202 The Nature of the Atmosphere
When Ed entered Dartmouth College in 1934, he had long ago made up his mind to be
a mathematician. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and entered Harvard to continue his study of math. With the outbreak of World War II, Lorenz
joined the Army Air Corps, who assigned him to attend army meteorology classes at MIT.
He learned to regard the weather as a combination of density, pressure, temperature,
three-dimensional wind velocities, and the atmosphere’s gaseous, liquid, and solid content.
The equations that describe this host of variables define the current weather conditions. The
rates of change in these equations define the changing weather pattern.
What Lorenz was not taught, and only much later discovered, was that no one knew
how to us