Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Self-organized criticality refers to the notion that there can be systems which have critical points that will be reached spontaneously via the system's dynamics, without the need for careful tuning of parameters.   More specifically, the critical point is an attractor.  The term "self-organized criticality" was coined by Per Bak, Chang Tao, and Kurt Wiesenfeld in a 1987 paper in Physical Review Letters.