Related papers: Long-Term Trends in Given Name Frequencies in Engl…
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…
In social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism for cultural evolution. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for the researches in the field. Here we perform statistical analyses on…
We analyze the social mechanisms that shape the popularity rise and fall of the names given to newborn babies. During the initial stage, popularity increases by imitation. As the people with the same name grow in number, however, its usage…
To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common…
Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms. In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast the sales of…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
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…
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…
This study deals with a fairly simply formulated problem -- how to estimate the number of people bearing the same full name in a large population. Estimation of name popularity can leverage personal name matching in databases and be of…
We examine the complete dataset of baby name popularity collected by U.S. Social Security Administration for the last 131 years (1880-2010). The ranked baby name popularity can be fitted empirically by a piecewise function consisting of…
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 present the data on wealth and income distributions in the United Kingdom, as well as on the income distributions in the individual states of the USA. In all of these data, we find that the great majority of population is described by an…
The distribution of numbers in human documents is determined by a variety of diverse natural and human factors, whose relative significance can be evaluated by studying the numbers' frequency of occurrence. Although it has been studied…
Bibliographic data is a rich source of information that goes beyond the use cases of location and citation -- it also encodes both cultural and technological context. For most of its existence, the scholarly record has changed slowly and…
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…
In this paper, we analyze the existence of possible correlation between public opinion of twitter users and the decision-making of persons who are influential in the society. We carry out this analysis on the example of the discussion of…
The frequency with which the letters of the English alphabet appear in writings has been applied to the field of cryptography, the development of keyboard mechanics, and the study of linguistics. We expanded on the statistical analysis of…
This article brings forward an estimation of the proportion of homonyms in large scale groups based on the distribution of first names and last names in a subset of these groups. The estimation is based on the generalization of the…
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…
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list,…