Related papers: Zipf's law arises naturally in structured, high-di…
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…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…
Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…
We show that the laws of Zipf and Benford, obeyed by scores of numerical data generated by many and diverse kinds of natural phenomena and human activity are related to the focal expression of a generalized thermodynamic structure. This…
Scientific cooperation on an international level has been well studied in the literature. However, much less is known about this cooperation on the intercontinental level. In this paper, we address this issue by creating a collection of…
In a prime number decomposition of integers in a given set, the occurrence frequencies of prime numbers are shown to satisfy a general forms of Zipf's law.
Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…
Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex…
We demonstrate that large texts, representing human (English, Russian, Ukrainian) and artificial (C++, Java) languages, display quantitative patterns characterized by the Benford-like and Zipf laws. The frequency of a word following the…
A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf's law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon…
Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…
We describe the link between the Zipf law and statistical distributions for the Fortuin-Kasteleyn clusters in Ising as well as Potts models. From these results it is seen that Zipf's law can be a criterion of a phase transition, but it does…
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…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
Two fundamental issues surrounding research on Zipf's law regarding city sizes are whether and why this law holds. This paper does not deal with the latter issue with respect to why, and instead investigates whether Zipf's law holds in a…
The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…
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…
Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…
When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…