PERSON
Per Bak
Danish theoretical physicist (1948–2002) whose 1987 discovery of self-organized criticality — the principle that complex systems drive themselves toward states where small perturbations trigger avalanches of any size — provided the mathematical foundation for understanding the AI transition as a sandpile at the critical angle.
Per Bak was a Danish theoretical physicist who spent the majority of his career at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where in 1987 he co-authored the landmark paper introducing self-organized criticality. His work demonstrated that large, complex systems naturally evolve toward a critical state where small causes can produce consequences of any magnitude, following power-law distributions rather than Gaussian bell curves. Though frequently accused of overclaiming by peers who found his universalist ambitions too sweeping, Bak's framework has been vindicated by research in the 2020s showing that artificial neural networks self-organize toward criticality during training. He died in 2002, before witnessing the AI revolution his physics would help explain.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bak's signature contribution was the sandpile model — a thought experiment in which grains of sand dropped one at a time onto a flat surface eventually reach a critical angle where the next grain