I've recently read an article in Pour la Science (a French equivalent of the Scientific American, with an overall very good quality) on the history of Chaos theory. Essentially, the article goes straight from Poincaré's work on celestial mechanics to the discovery Lorenz' equations, jumping over sixty or seventy years as if nothing had happened:
Poincaré’s results, independent findings by Jacques Hadamard, and experimental hints of chaos seen by their contemporaries were dismissed by many as pathologies or artifacts of noise or methodological shortcomings and were referred to as a “gallery of monsters.”4 It would take nearly another century for chaos theory to gain a lasting foothold.
This view is not isolated. For instance, on the page for Edward Lorenz' Kyoto prize:
He made his boldest scientific achievement in discovering "deterministic chaos," a principle which has profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.
Sure, these things are meant to be hyperbolic. However, he is not credited with "oustanding achievements in chaos theory", but with single-handedly creating the field.
On the over hand, while Lorenz' equations are interesting and exhibit a variety of interesting phenomenons (not the least being Lorenz' attractor), from a mathematical point of view, I don't really see it as the beginning of a field. Ergodic theory has been around since thirty to forty years, so the idea of "deterministic chaos" has been there for quite some time. The years around Lorenz' work also saw the studies of Anosov (Anosov diffeomorphisms), Ruelle (statistical mechanics), Smale (horseshoe map)... While I can somewhat grasp the importance of the results of the later authors, I don't really see how Lorenz' work is in any way central.
So, in short, I don't see why Lorenz has been given such a central place in the narratives around chaos theory. What am I missing?