X-Nico

Chao Tang

In 1987, as a post-doctoral research scientist in the Solid State Theory Group of Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and another fellow post-doctoral scientist, Kurt Wiesenfeld, along with their mentor, Per Bak, presented new ideas in group organization with a concept they coined self-organized criticality in their paper in Physical Review Letters.

Self-organized criticality

Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld's 1987 paper linked together these factors: a simple cellular automaton was shown to produce several characteristic features observed in natural complexity (fractal geometry, 1/f noise and power laws) in a way that could be linked to critical-point phenomena.

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