Related papers: Re-inventing Willis
The paper written in 1925 by G. Udny Yule that we celebrate in this special issue introduces several novelties and results that we recall in detail. First, we discuss Yule (1925)'s main legacies over the past century, focusing on empirical…
Yule's 1925 paper introducing the branching model that bears his name was a landmark contribution to the biodiversity sciences. In his paper, Yule developed stochastic models to explain the observed distribution of species across genera and…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
Qian, Luscombe and Gerstein [J. Molecular Biol. 313 (2001) 673--681] introduced a model of the diversification of protein folds in a genome that we may formulate as follows. Consider a multitype Yule process starting with one individual in…
In 1655, John Wallis whilst at the University of Oxford discovered the famous and beautiful formula for pi, now known as Wallis' Product. Since then, several analogous formulae have been discovered generalising the original. One more modern…
Taylor's power law is one of the mostly widely known empirical patterns in ecology discovered in the 20th century. It states that the variance of species population density scales as a power-law function of the mean population density.…
Modeling distributions of citations to scientific papers is crucial for understanding how science develops. However, there is a considerable empirical controversy on which statistical model fits the citation distributions best. This paper…
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…
The evolutionary origin of universal statistics in biochemical reaction network is studied, to explain the power-law distribution of reaction links and the power-law distributions of chemical abundances. Using cell models with catalytic…
Power law distributions have been repeatedly observed in a wide variety of socioeconomic, biological and technological areas. In many of the observations, e.g., city populations and sizes of living organisms, the objects of interest evolve…
We develop a model for the distribution of scientific citations. The model involves a dual mechanism: in the direct mechanism, the author of a new paper finds an old paper A and cites it. In the indirect mechanism, the author of a new paper…
Heavy-tailed or power-law distributions are becoming increasingly common in biological literature. A wide range of biological data has been fitted to distributions with heavy tails. Many of these studies use simple fitting methods to find…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
In this paper, we propose an optimization-based mechanism to explain power law distributions, where the function that the optimization process is seeking to optimize is derived mathematically, then the behavior and interpretation of this…
This letter introduces a mechanism for constructing, through a process of distributed decision-making, substrates for the study of collective dynamics on extended power-law weighted networks with both a desired scaling exponent and a fixed…
Given $n$ samples of a regular discrete distribution $\pi$, we prove in this article first a serial of SLLNs results (of Dvoretzky and Erd\"{o}s' type) which implies a typical power law when $\pi$ is heavy-tailed. Constructing a (random)…
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…
Several probability distributions have been proposed in the literature, especially with the aim of obtaining models that are more flexible relative to the behaviors of the density and hazard rate functions. Recently, a new generalization of…
There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind's scientific endeavor. However, recent progress in applying the tools of science to understand science itself has been unprecedented because only recently…
Changes in citation distributions over 100 years can reveal much about the evolution of the scientific communities or disciplines. The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly-cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications,…