Echoes

I've begun reading George Stewart's _Storm_. So far, it seems to have the same characteristics as _Earth Abides_, a mix of (informative!) didacticism with solid human interest. The passage I just read had a pleasing multidirectional allusion. A meteorologist, analyzing data (with hand-annotated map and slide rule) that point to the just-emerging storm, recalls the relevant equations, and Stewart comments "To a well-trained mathematical meteorologist, they were more beautiful than Grecian urns." Of course, that's a reference to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know"), but it also called Edna St. Vincent Millay to my mind ("Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.").

I was going to say a few words about the aesthetics of mathematics, but Edna has done that job better than I could.

Before the Butterfly

George R. Stewart wrote _Storm_ in 1940; in the introduction to the edition I have, he mentions "the dark days of Dunkirk and the fall of France". That makes the following item intriguing to me. (An otherwise unnamed Junior Meteorologist is thinking.)

"He thought of his old professor's saying: 'A Chinaman sneezing in Shen-si may set men to shoveling snow in New York City'."

The famous hurricane-causing butterfly first appeared in the literature in the early to mid-1960s. Apparently the underlying idea was already present in the meteorological community a good deal earlier. (The general problem of sensitivity to initial conditions goes back at least to the work of Henri Poincare at the beginning of the twentieth century.)