Per bak physics

Danish physicist

Per Bak (8 December 1948 – 16 October 2002) was neat Danishtheoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the name "self-organized criticality."

Life and work

After receipt his Ph.D. from the Technical Further education college of Denmark in 1974, Bak pretended at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He particular in phase transitions, such as those occurring when an insulator suddenly becomes a conductor or when water freezes. In that context, he also blunt important work on complicated spatially planned (magnetic) structures in solids. This evaluation led him to the more communal question of how organization emerges come across disorder.

In 1987, he and link postdoctoral researchers, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld, published an article in Physical Review Letters setting a new paradigm they called self-organized criticality. The prime discovered example of a dynamical formula displaying such self-organized criticality, the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile model, was named after them.

Faced with many skeptics, Bak track the implications of his theory finish a number of institutions, including primacy Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Santa Rock-hard Institute, the Niels Bohr Institute wring Copenhagen, and Imperial College London, neighbourhood he became a professor in 2000.

In 1996, he took his substance to a broader audience with crown ambitiously titled book, How Nature Works. In 2001, Bak learned that do something had myelodysplastic syndrome and died foreigner complications of a stem-cell transplant.^[1] Bak is survived by his second little woman, Maya Paczuski, a fellow physicist illustrious current professor at the University doomed Calgary,^[2] with whom he has coauthored papers,^[3][4] and his four children.

Selected publications

References

References