<human>:  With regards to the concept of self-organized criticality, who was the first person to propose this concept?
<bot>: That would be a French physicist named Benoit Mandelbrot. He was the first to propose that there is a class of complex systems that exhibit self-organized criticality. The idea is that these systems are characterized by a balance between order and disorder, and that they can exhibit complex behavior that is similar to the behavior of physical systems that are described by the laws of thermodynamics.