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DRAFT CORRECTIONS for Post 41 - Two Decimal Places at MIT (Lorenz biographical)

Post: _posts/2026-05-15-The-coyote-who-found-chaos.md

Summary verdict

The post is unusually faithful to its primary biographical source (Emanuel 2011 NAS Biographical Memoir of Lorenz) and to the in-repo research files. The three brief-inherited errors (father a “dentist”, advisor “Starr”, town “Lincoln”) are explicitly identified AND corrected inside the post body itself, which is the right editorial move.

External Wikipedia / NCAR / MIT / Nature / web-search checks against ~21 sources confirmed every factual anchor I tested. Below is the complete list of suggested corrections, in priority order from “should fix” to “optional refinement”.

1. SHOULD FIX – “James Van Vleck” -> “John Hasbrouck Van Vleck” (or footnote)

Location

§1 “Hartford to Cambridge, 1917-1948”, paragraph beginning “He went on directly to Harvard University for graduate work in mathematics”. Around line 61 of the post.

Current text

He studied group theory, set theory, and combinatorial topology under Saunders Mac Lane, Marshall Stone, and James Van Vleck (the last of whom would later win the Nobel Prize in physics).

Problem

The 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (commonly “John H. Van Vleck”), shared with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill Mott. He taught at Harvard from 1934 onward and was Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy from 1951. He was Lorenz’s contemporary at Harvard during Lorenz’s 1938-1942 graduate years.

“James Van Vleck” appears to be an error. The post is faithfully reproducing the same phrasing as Emanuel’s NAS Biographical Memoir (p. 4: “James Van Vleck (who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics)”), but Emanuel made an error: there is no Nobel laureate by that name. (There was a 19th-century mathematician James Van Vleck, but he died in 1875, and he was at Wesleyan, not Harvard.)

Recommendation

Option A (minimal change, footnote correction):

Change the name to “John Hasbrouck Van Vleck” and add a footnote saying:

Emanuel’s NAS memoir gives the name as “James Van Vleck”; this appears to be a slip. The Harvard physics professor and 1977 Nobel laureate is John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (commonly “John H. Van Vleck”).

Option B (in-line correction):

He studied group theory, set theory, and combinatorial topology under Saunders Mac Lane, Marshall Stone, and John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (the last of whom would later win the 1977 Nobel Prize in physics).

Option B is preferable because it removes the inherited error without dragging Emanuel into a quasi-correction footnote.

Note for the file research/people/Edward_Lorenz.md

The in-repo research file at research/people/Edward_Lorenz.md also inherits the “James Van Vleck” wording (§3 “Education: Dartmouth and Harvard (1934-1942)”). This file should also be corrected for consistency in future posts.

2. OPTIONAL REFINEMENT – Sanders 1980 “bomb” paper had Gyakum as co-author

Location

§8 “Charney down the hall”, paragraph beginning “Around them on the corridor were a striking cast…”. Around line 307.

Current text

Fred Sanders – the synoptic-meteorology specialist, who would coin the term “bomb” for explosively deepening extratropical cyclones in his 1980 paper – was a junior colleague…

Refinement

Fred Sanders – the synoptic-meteorology specialist, who would coin the term “bomb” for explosively deepening extratropical cyclones in his 1980 paper with John R. Gyakum – was a junior colleague…

This is not strictly an error (Sanders was first author and is the term’s coiner), but the paper had a co-author. Optional.

3. OPTIONAL REFINEMENT – Cessna at East Boston was 1931, not 1928

Location

Figure caption following §1 (line 71 approximately).

Current text

The department was the first university programme of its kind in the United States; by the time Lorenz arrived for cadet training in 1942 Rossby had moved on to the University of Chicago, but the department was already in the hands of Henry Houghton, who would run it for twenty-five years.

Actually that text is fine. The earlier sentence is:

Rossby had founded what would become the MIT Department of Meteorology in 1928 inside the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, with Guggenheim Fund backing and a Cessna monoplane for upper-air observations from East Boston Airport.

Refinement (optional)

The Guggenheim Fund backing is correct for the 1928 establishment. The Cessna monoplane was actually acquired in 1931, when Professor Daniel Sayre flew it for six months from East Boston Airport. The current phrasing reads as if all three (the 1928 founding, the Guggenheim backing, and the Cessna) were simultaneous. Optional clarification:

Rossby had founded what would become the MIT Department of Meteorology in 1928 inside the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, with Guggenheim Fund backing. A Cessna monoplane for upper-air observations from East Boston Airport followed in 1931.

This is genuinely minor and probably not worth changing if it would break the rhythm.

4. NOT A CORRECTION – A few items deliberately confirmed

These are claims I specifically verified against external sources and which check out; no change needed but worth recording in the verified-facts log:

  • Charney died 16 June 1981 of cancer (cause of death = cancer; “lung cancer” specifically is consistent with several biographical sources but Wikipedia gives only “cancer”). Post says “lung cancer” - acceptable but not the most cautious phrasing.
  • MIT moved from downtown Boston to Cambridge in 1916. (Post says “the 1916 move to Cambridge” - correct.)
  • Green Building (Building 54) by I.M. Pei + Araldo Cossutta, 1962-1964, 18 stories, 84 metres, tallest in Cambridge until 2019.
  • LGP-30: 113 tubes, 1450 diodes, 4096 31-bit words, 800 lb, $47,000 in 1956.
  • Bauer-Thorpe-Brunet 2015 Nature 525, 47-55.
  • Lorenz 2008 posthumous “Compound windows of the Hénon map” Physica D 237, 1689-1704.
  • Solar eclipse 24 January 1925 path of totality across CT, RI, MA.
  • Lorenz 96 model: ECMWF Seminar lecture 1995, publication 1996.
  • Margaret Hamilton: BA Earlham 1958, joined MIT mid-1959.
  • Philip Merilees: visiting scientist at NCAR 1972-1974, on leave from McGill.
  • Lorenz Center: 2011, founded by Rothman + Emanuel, backed by Dean Marc Kastner.

Final assessment

The single substantive correction needed is the John H. Van Vleck name. Everything else is correct, well-attributed, and faithful to its sources. The post inherits the Van Vleck error from its primary biographical source (Emanuel), so this is an honest reproduction of an error in the literature – but it is an error, and it is worth fixing since the right name (John Hasbrouck Van Vleck) is straightforwardly verifiable from Wikipedia in 30 seconds.

No other corrections are strictly needed.