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Related papers: Zipf's law, Hierarchical Structure, and Shuffling-…

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Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-10-05 Onofrio Mazzarisi , Amanda de Azevedo-Lopes , Jeferson J. Arenzon , Federico Corberi

Many scientists are interested in but puzzled by the various inverse power laws with a negative exponent 1 such as the rank-size rule. The rank-size rule is a very simple scaling law followed by many observations of the ubiquitous empirical…

Physics and Society · Physics 2011-04-25 Yanguang Chen

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Andrea Mazzolini , Alberto Colliva , Michele Caselle , Matteo Osella

Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-07-06 Lei Dong

Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-02 Marc Barthelemy

Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-10 Clementine Cottineau

Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-18 Ryohei Hisano , Didier Sornette , Takayuki Mizuno

The time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 Caglar Tuncay

In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-07-05 L. Benguigui , M. Marinov

Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-03-05 Tamás Nepusz , Tamás Vicsek

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

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

A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-09-04 Bin Jiang

Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-26 Charlotte James , Sandro Azaele , Amos Maritan , Filippo Simini

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

The statistical characterization of the distribution of visible matter in the universe is a central problem in modern cosmology. In this respect, a crucial question still lacking a definitive answer concerns how large are the greatest…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2021-07-28 Giordano De Marzo , Francesco Sylos Labini , Luciano Pietronero

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

Emergence of self-similarity in hierarchical community structures is ubiquitous in complex systems. Yet, there is a dearth of universal quantification and general principles describing the formation of such structures. Here, we discover…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-07-16 Shruti Tandon , Nidhi Dilip Sonwane , Tobias Braun , Norbert Marwan , Juergen Kurths , R. I. Sujith

The law of allometric scaling based on Zipf distributions can be employed to research hierarchies of cities in a geographical region. However, the allometric patterns are easily influenced by random disturbance from the noises in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen , Jian Feng

Inverse power-law interaction forms, such as the inverse-square law, recur across a wide range of physical, social, and spatial systems. While traditionally derived from specific microscopic mechanisms, the ubiquity of these laws suggests a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-16 Jerome Baray