Title: Mathematical Models of Self-Organized Criticality

Abstract: Self-organized criticality is a concept from physics that tries to explain natural phenomena such as earthquakes and avalanches. We will explain the ways that these phenomena are not well explained by most models from statistical physics. We will discuss what self-organized criticality is and the mathematical models that have been proposed to explain it.  Finally we will talk about the recent progress in rigorously proving results about these models.