[1][2] He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

He worked as a weather forecaster for the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, leading him to pursue graduate studies in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This interest was sparked, in part, after a visit to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he met Jule Charney, then head of the IAS's Meteorological Research Group and a leading dynamical meteorologist at the time.

)[12] In 1953, Lorenz took over leadership of a project at MIT that ran complex simulations of weather models that he used to evaluate statistical forecasting techniques.

[11] By the late 1950s, Lorenz was skeptical of the appropriateness of the linear statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear.

[13] In 1961, Lorenz was using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to simulate weather patterns by modeling 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed.

His work on the topic, assisted by Ellen Fetter, culminated in the publication of his 1963 paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and with it, the foundation of chaos theory.

They describe a scenario in which meteorologists, in the computer age, generate multiple long-term weather forecasts based on different yet similar initial atmospheric conditions.

[21] Lorenz's insights on deterministic chaos resonated widely starting in the 1970s and 80s, when it spurred new fields of study in virtually every branch of science, from biology to geology to physics.

[22] Of the seminal significance of Lorenz's work, Kerry Emanuel, a prominent meteorologist and climate scientist at MIT, has stated:[23] "By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics.

[26] Later in life, Lorenz lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Jane Loban (1919–2001), and their three children, Nancy, Cheryl, and Edward.

A video produced for the event highlights the indelible mark made by Charney and Lorenz on MIT and the field of meteorology as a whole.