A weather model gone strange
Edward Lorenz distilled atmospheric convection into three ODEs and found that tiny changes in initial conditions led to wildly different outcomes — deterministic yet unpredictable.
The butterfly
Plotted in phase space, the solutions trace a butterfly-shaped strange attractor: bounded, never repeating, infinitely detailed. It became the emblem of chaos theory.
See it yourself
Open the dynamics studio, select the Lorenz system, and nudge the Rayleigh number ρ. Watch the trajectory reorganize as the system passes through its bifurcations.