Related papers: The Ten Thousand Kims
We empirically study the genealogical trees of ten families for about five centuries in Korea. Although each family tree contains only the paternal part, the family names of women married to the family have been recorded, which allows us to…
The family name distribution in Korea is investigated in comparison with previous studies in other countries. In Korea, both the family name and its birthplace, where the ancestor of the family originated, are commonly used to distinguish…
An individual's identity in a human society is specified by his or her name. Differently from family names, usually inherited from fathers, a given name for a child is often chosen at the parents' disposal. However, their decision cannot be…
Although cumulative family name distributions in many countries exhibit power-law forms, there also exist counterexamples. The origin of different family name distributions across countries is discussed analytically in the framework of a…
The study of human mobility is both of fundamental importance and of great potential value. For example, it can be leveraged to facilitate efficient city planning and improve prevention strategies when faced with epidemics. The newfound…
Why does Zipf's law give a good description of data from seemingly completely unrelated phenomena? Here it is argued that the reason is that they can all be described as outcomes of a ubiquitous random group division: the elements can be…
We investigate the distribution function and the cumulative probability for Korean household incomes, i.e., the current, labor, and property incomes. For our case, the distribution functions are consistent with a power law. It is also…
We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…
In the same way as tree rings give us useful information about the climate many decades ago (or even centuries ago in the case of big trees), population pyramids allow us to know birth or death rates several decades earlier. Naturally, they…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
As social issues related to gender bias attract closer scrutiny, accurate tools to determine the gender profile of large groups become essential. When explicit data is unavailable, gender is often inferred from names. Current methods follow…
We study the frequency distribution of family names. From a common data base, we count the number of people who share the same family name. This is the size of the family. We find that (i) the total number of different family names in a…
Surnames and nonrecombining alleles are inherited from a single parent in a highly similar way. A simple birth-death model with mutations can accurately describe this process. Exponentially growing and constant populations are investigated,…
Cultural traits such as words, names, decorative styles, and technical standards often assume arbitrary values and are thought to evolve neutrally. But neutral evolution cannot explain why some traits come and go in cycles of popularity…
Large scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…
We introduce a novel machine learning approach to leverage historical and contemporary maps and systematically predict economic statistics. Our simple algorithm extracts meaningful features from the maps based on their color compositions…
The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the…
Kingman's House-of-Cards model is a simple and celebrated model to describe the evolution of population under the competition of selection and mutation. Letting mutation probabilities vary on generations makes the model more realistic and…
Pedigrees are directed acyclic graphs that represent ancestral relationships between individuals in a population. Based on a schematic recombination process, we describe two simple Markov models for sequences evolving on pedigrees - Model R…
We calculate the probability distribution of repetitions of ancestors in a genealogical tree for simple neutral models of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. Each ancestor at generation g in the…