Paul Halpern

In 1889, Henri Poincaré won a prestigious mathematics competition celebrating the King of Sweden’s birthday. He submitted a proof demonstrating that the three-body problem (calculating the gravitational orbits of three celestial bodies, like the Earth, Sun, and Moon) was completely stable. Right before the journal went to print, an editor found a logical gap in Poincaré’s equations. Poincaré realized his proof was fundamentally wrong. He frantically recalled all distributed copies of the journal, paid for the printing costs out of his own pocket, and re-worked the math. In fixing his error, Poincaré discovered that tiny changes in initial conditions could lead to radically different, unpredictable outcomes. This error accidentally birthed modern chaos theory and the concept of the “Butterfly Effect.”