Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorology professor, would have loved Francisco Lindor and the New York Mets. Lorenz, who died in 2008, was the father of chaos theory, the official mathematical field of postseason baseball. He grasped in the 1960s how small changes in modeling could produce vastly different results.
What Newton was to the apple, Lorenz was to the butterfly. After first positing how the flap of a seagull’s wings could influence a large weather event such as a tornado (not literally, but as an allegory of the fallibility of weather forecasting), a decade or so later the seagull in his analogy became the more poetic butterfly. It was genius marketing as much as genius math. The Butterfly Effect was born.
