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Present human languages display slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution for size [1-3], whereas present cities follow power law (Pareto-Zipf law)[4]. Our model considers the competition between languages and that between cities…

Computational Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Caglar Tuncay

We propose hypotheses describing the empirical finding of an association between the exponents of urban GDP scaling and Zipf's law for cities. These hypotheses represent various combinations of directional or reciprocal causal links between…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-07-27 Fabiano L. Ribeiro , Jose Lobo , Diego Rybski

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-20 Richard Perline , Ronald Perline

Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-10-06 Luis M. A. Bettencourt , Jose Lobo

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-21 Alvaro Corral , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Gemma Boleda , Albert Diaz-Guilera , .

This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-07-17 Bin Jiang , Tao Jia

Zipf's law of city-size distributions can be expressed by three types of mathematical models: one-parameter form, two-parameter form, and three-parameter form. The one-parameter and one of the two-parameter models are familiar to urban…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-23 Henry W. Lin , Abraham Loeb

We present a general approach to explain the Zipf's law of city distribution. If the simplest interaction (pairwise) is assumed, individuals tend to form cities in agreement with the well-known statistics

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-10-31 Matteo Marsili , Yi-Cheng Zhang

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-16 Kim Chol-jun

Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-17 Juan Ignacio Perotti , Orlando Vito Billoni

We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-18 B. Blasius , R. Toenjes

The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-29 Hernan Rozenfeld , Diego Rybski , Xavier Gabaix , Hernan A. Makse

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-05-09 Horia-Nicolai L. Teodorescu

For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence to a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical form of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Ben\^{i}ot Mandelbrot to that which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-24 Jake Ryland Williams , Giovanni C. Santia

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

Zipf's law is one the most conspicuous empirical facts for cities, however, there is no convincing explanation for the scaling relation between rank and size and its scaling exponent. Based on the idea from general fractals and scaling,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-20 Yanguang Chen

The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-05-24 Erneson A. Oliveira , Vasco Furtado , José S. Andrade , Hernán A. Makse

The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-03 Felipe Urbina , Javier Vera