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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

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-19 Qunzhi Zhang , Didier Sornette

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

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

Most of various large-size complex systems in nature and society can be well described as complex networks (graphs) to better understand the evolutional mechanisms and dynamical functions behind themselves. Of some part follow scale-free…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-08 Fei Ma

Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. The Zipf law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-06-09 Rolf Bergs

Stopwords are words that are not very informative to the content or the meaning of a language text. Most stopwords are function words but can also be common verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In contrast to the well known Zipf's law for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Wentian Li , Oscar Fontanelli

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…

Applications · Statistics 2024-09-18 Thiago Trafane Oliveira Santos , Daniel Oliveira Cajueiro

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-09-23 M. E. J. Newman

The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…

Applications · Statistics 2024-07-24 Clement Lee , Emma Eastoe , Aiden Farrell

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-11-20 Marc Serra-Peralta , Joan Serrà , Álvaro Corral

Beta Rank Function (BRF) is a two-sided distribution characterized by a smooth peak and double powerlaw decay, widely used to model empirical data exhibiting deviations from pure power laws. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-step…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-01-28 Oscar Fontanelli , Wentian Li

We study the rank distribution, the cumulative probability, and the probability density of returns of stock prices of listed firms traded in four stock markets. We find that the rank distribution and the cumulative probability of stock…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2008-12-02 Kyungsik Kim , S. -M. Yoon , K. H. Chang

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 K. E. Kechedzhy O. V. Usatenko , V. A. Yampol'skii

It is shown that the distribution of low variability periods in the activity of human heart rate typically follows a multi-scaling Zipf's law. The presence or failure of a power law, as well as the values of the scaling exponents, are…

Medical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. Kalda , M. Sakki , M. Vainu , M. Laan

We present an extensive analysis of long-term statistics of the queries to websites using logs collected on several web caches in Russian academic networks and on US IRCache caches. We check the sensitivity of the statistics to several…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Serge A. Krashakov , Anton B. Teslyuk , Lev N. Shchur

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 and Society · Physics 2022-02-01 Clémentine Cottineau

A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-16 Davide Cugini , André Timpanaro , Giacomo Livan , Giacomo Guarnieri

We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf's rank analysis, Simon's model is presented in a mathematically elementary…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Damian H. Zanette