By Bak

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Per Bak (born December 8, 1948 in Brønderslev , Denmark ; † October 16, 2002 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish theoretical physicist who has made a name for himself in the research of emergent , complex systems .

Life

He received his PhD in 1974 from the University of Roskilde , Denmark. He then taught and researched at the Brookhaven National Laboratory , the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and from 2000 as a professor at Imperial College London .

In his research he first examined the magnetic and structural properties of solids, especially in the vicinity of phase transitions. Examples include his original work (with Juhani von Boehm, Jacques Villain and others) as well as his review article from 1982 on commensurable and incommensurable magnetic orders, etc. a. in Ising models with competing interactions, ANNNI model , which aroused great interest in the professional world.

In 1987, together with colleagues Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld, he published his groundbreaking work on self-organized criticality in Physical Review Letters . He put the ideas in a broader context in his 1996 book How Nature works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality.

Since 1993 he has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

Fonts

  • Commensurate Phases, Incommensurate Phases and the Devil's Staircase , Reports Progress Physics, 45 (1982): 587-629.
  • with Chao Tang, Kurt Wiesenfeld: Self-Organized Criticality: An Explanation of 1 / f Noise , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 59 (1987): pp. 381-384.
  • with Tang, Wiesenfeld: Self-organized criticality , Phys. Rev. A, Vol. 38, 1988, pp. 364-374
  • How nature works. The Science of Self-Organized Criticality , New York 1996. ISBN 0-387-94791-4

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bak, Per
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Brønderslev , Denmark
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 2002
Place of death Copenhagen