Kurt Wiesenfeld is an American physicist working primarily on non-linear dynamics.
His works primarily concern stochastic resonance, spontaneous synchronization of coupled oscillators, and non-linear laser dynamics.
From 1984 to 1985, he was a Lecturer and Research Scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
In 1987, as a post-doctoral research scientist in the Solid State Theory Group of Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and another fellow post-doctoral scientist, Chao Tang, along with their mentor, Per Bak, presented new ideas in group organization with a concept they coined self-organized criticality in their paper in Physical Review Letters.
The first discovered example of a dynamical system displaying such self-organized criticality was named after them as the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld "sandpile" model.