These scientists created jewelry out of the striking shapes of chaos theory - Ars Technica

"Seeing the chaotic shapes transformed into real, polished, shiny, physical jewelry was a great pleasure for the whole team.

The concept of chaos might suggest complete randomness, but to scientists, it denotes systems that are so sensitive to initial conditions that their output appears random, obscuring their underlying internal rules of order: the stock market, rioting crowds, brain waves during an epileptic seizure, or the weather.

Once he had his skeleton system, he kept a continuous simulation running on his computer, which would produce a day’s worth of virtual weather every minute.

Lorenz had entered the shorter, rounded-off numbers, assuming that the difference—one part in a thousand—was inconsequential, similar to a small puff of wind that is unlikely to have much impact on large-scale features of the weather.

To investigate further, Lorenz simplified his complex weather model, focusing on rolling fluid convection in our atmosphere: basically, a gas in a solid rectangular box with a heat source on the bottom and cooled from above, in which warm air rises to the top and cooler air sinks to the bottom.

He simplified a few fluid dynamics equations and found that plotting the results of specific parameter values in three dimensions produced an unusual butterfly-shaped figure.