who coined the phrase sensitive dependence on initial conditions?
Answer Well, I’m not really sure, but I’d say that Lorenz initially discovered that weather depended in this way on initial conditions during his simulations of weather. This is most likely the origin of the notion that outcomes depended sensitively on initial conditions, since it’s the first time that computers predicted the outcome of a chaotic physical system and this surprising effect was actually observed. Before the invention of computers people had a kind of qualitative understanding of chaos and not a quantitative look at the huge difference between different systems over longer time periods.
