Per Bak

Per Bak (8 December 1948 – 16 October 2002) was a Danish theoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term "self-organized criticality."

Life and work

After receiving his Ph.D. from the

Faced with many skeptics, Bak pursued the implications of his theory at a number of institutions, including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Santa Fe Institute, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Imperial College London, where he became a professor in 2000.

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

Selected publications

• Bak, P (1 June 1982). "Commensurate phases, incommensurate phases and the devil's staircase". Reports on Progress in Physics. 45 (6): 587–629.
  doi:10.1088/0034-4885/45/6/001
  .
• Bak, Per; Tang, Chao; Wiesenfeld, Kurt (27 July 1987). "Self-organized criticality: an explanation of 1/f noise". Physical Review Letters. 59 (4): 381–384.
  PMID 10035754
  .
• 1996, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, New York: Copernicus.
  ISBN 0-387-94791-4
• Bak, Per (December 1983). "Doing physics with microcomputers". Physics Today. 36 (12): 25–28.
  doi:10.1063/1.2915383
  .