Maya Paczuski facts for kids

Maya Paczuski (born April 7, 1963) is a famous physicist and the leader of the Complexity Science Group at the University of Calgary. She studies how complex systems work, like why earthquakes happen and how different parts of a network connect. She was born in Israel but grew up in the United States.

Maya Paczuski studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in 1986. Later, she got her Ph.D. in Condensed matter physics from the same university, working with Mehran Kardar.

Her Amazing Work

Maya Paczuski is known for her research in complexity science. This field looks at how many small parts interact to create big, complicated behaviors. She studies things like "self-organized criticality" and "avalanche dynamics."

Understanding Complex Systems

• Self-organized criticality is a way that complex systems naturally reach a critical state. Think of a sandpile: if you keep adding grains of sand, eventually one grain will cause a big avalanche. This happens without anyone planning it.
• Avalanche dynamics studies how these sudden, large events happen. This can apply to many things, from actual snow avalanches to earthquakes or even how ideas spread online.
• She also studies complex networks. These are like maps showing how different things are connected. For example, how friends are connected on social media, or how different parts of the internet link up.

Her work helps us understand why things like earthquakes happen and how they create smaller quakes called aftershocks.

Where She Worked

Before starting the Complexity Science Group at the University of Calgary, Maya Paczuski worked at many important places around the world.

She held positions at:

• M.I.T.
• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• The Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark
• The University of Houston
• NORDITA in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Imperial College London
• The von Neumann Institute for Computing at Forschungszentrum Jülich
• The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

At the Perimeter Institute, she helped create and run the first program focused on complex systems and statistical physics.

Maya Paczuski was married to Per Bak, who was a theoretical physicist from Denmark. They wrote scientific papers together.

See also

• Self-organized criticality
• Geophysics
• Complexity
• Boolean network
• Complex network
• Aftershock