Related papers: Why Does Zipf's Law Break Down in Rank-Size Distri…
Zipf's power law is a general empirical regularity found in many natural and social systems. A recently developed theory predicts that Zipf's law corresponds to systems that are growing according to a maximally sustainable path in the…
It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…
We discuss the meaning of Zipf's law in nuclear multifragmentation. We remark that Zipf's law is a consequence of a power law fragment size distribution with exponent $\tau \simeq 2$. We also recall why the presence of such distribution is…
The rank-size plots of a large number of different physical and socio-economic systems are usually said to follow Zipf's law, but a unique framework for the comprehension of this ubiquitous scaling law is still lacking. Here we show that a…
Zipfs Law states that rank-size distributions of city populations follow a power law with an exponent of -1. The assertion of a universal power law is controversial because the linearity and slope appear to vary over time and among…
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…
Zipf's law in language lacks a definitive origin, debated across fields. This study explains Zipf-like behavior using geometric mechanisms without linguistic elements. The Full Combinatorial Word Model (FCWM) forms words from a finite…
Many complex systems are composed of disparate, interacting types of varying sizes: Species abundances in ecosystems, firm sizes in markets, city populations in countries, word counts in language, etc. A longstanding mystery of complex…
We show power-scaling behaviors for fluctuations in share volume, which no other studies have so far done. After analyzing a database of the daily transactions for all securities listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, we selected 1050 large…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…
Zipf's law states that the probability of a variable being larger than $s$ is roughly inversely proportional to $s$. In this paper, we evaluate Zipf's law for the distribution of firm size by the number of employees in Brazil. We use…
Zipf's law states that the number of firms with size greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Most explanations start with Gibrat's rule of proportional growth but require additional constraints. We show that Gibrat's rule, at all…
In this article, I conduct a textual and contextual analysis of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities. Building on previous meta-analysis material openly available, I collect full texts and bibliographies of 66 scientific…
Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…
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…
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…
Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings…
Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…
The binary many-step Markov chain with the step-like memory function is considered as a model for the analysis of rank distributions of words in stochastic symbolic dynamical systems. We prove that the envelope curve for this distribution…