About the NCEAS Logo and the Lorenz Attractor

The NCEAS logo is derived from a beautiful strange attractor produced by the
equations of MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. That this elegant representation of nature can arise from clever computation is a source of inspiration for NCEAS.
 

 

Lorenz attractor

 The Lorenz Attractor is an Icon of Chaos Theory
                                                                            Credit: Wikipedia Commons  


The butterfly itself is also an apt symbol for NCEAS, since the Center is located along a stretch of the California coast that hosts the most renowned Monarch butterfly overwintering site in the western United States.

Fittingly, two NCEAS ecoinformatics products have been named in honor of members of this remarkable insect order:

Monarch, an early workflow prototyping experiment, and
Morpho, metadata and data management software, named for a genus of neotropical butterflies

Especially in this era of global climate change, the problems tackled by NCEAS researchers resonate as much as ever in the immortal words of Lorenz himself: "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?"