Edward N. Lorenz grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1938 and a master's degree in math from Harvard in 1940. He went on to earn his doctoral degree in meteorology at MIT in 1948 while serving as a weather forecaster in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Lorenz was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Meteorology at MIT in 1955.

Lorenz is best known for the first modern scientific example of what later came to be known as chaos theory, starting with his paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flows," [Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 20, 1963, 130-141]. The title of the 1963 paper concisely summarized a fact which came as a surprise to many scientists. It contains a numerical study of a simplified three-dimensional atmospheric model now known as the Lorenz equations with the property that arbitrarily small fluctuations are amplified over time to produce large differences in behavior of solutions. Though previous examples of chaotic behavior had been shown by Poincare and Birkhoff - work which was well known to Lorenz - their contributions had largely been forgotten outside of mathematics. The existence of simple deterministic equations with chaotic behavior has had far reaching consequences. In addition, the paper demonstrated that a numerical study could be used to understand qualitative behavior. The ideas have fundamentally altered both the approach and the types of questions being asked throughout science.

Lorenz's work did not receive much attention until the mid-1970's, when its importance was first recognized and appreciated when it was circulated through the mathematical dynamical systems community. However, he clearly understood these consequences in 1963. He wrote "in view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise and very-long-range forecasting would seem to be non-existent." He later summarized these ideas with accessible and appealing imagery in his 1972 American Association for the Advancement of Science title "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

Lorenz received many awards, including being elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, receiving the Crafoord Prize of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1983, and the Kyoto Prize in 1991. He became an emeritus professor at MIT in 1987. He remained active, finishing his final paper with a collaborator just one week before his death. He is survived by three children and four grandchildren.