Butterfly Wings

The mathematician Edward Lorenz once posed a question: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” We can further ask: what do multiple organ failure, the collapse of a stock market, the rise and fall of terrorist networks, and global warming all have in common? In this semilab, we'll learn that all of these involve complex systems: in which dynamics are fundamentally nonlinear and in which small changes in initial conditions can show surprisingly counter-intuitive emergent effects. In our hands-on very basic introduction to complex systems, we'll learn how to use simple computer modeling to conceptualize and simulate dynamic nonlinear systems. Our goal is that you will come out of this semilab thinking of the world and its processes in a fundamentally different way.