George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf (pronEng|ˈzɪf), (1902–1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf worked at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese languages and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet and many other collections of data.

Zipf's law

George Kingsley Zipf is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely,

:$P\_n\; sim\; 1/n^a$

where "P_n" is the frequency of a word ranked "n"^th and the exponent "a" is almost 1. This means that the second item occurs approximately 1/2 as often as the first, and the third item 1/3 as often as the first, and so on. [http://www.2dcurves.com/conicsection/conicsectionh.html] .

ee also

*Benford's law
*Bradford's law
*Demographic gravitation
*Lotka's law
*Pareto distribution or Pareto principle or the "80-20 rule"
*Power law
*Principle of least effort

Bibliography

*Zipf, George Kingsley (1932): "Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language." Cambridge (Mass.).
*——— (1935): "The Psycho-Biology of Language." Cambridge (Mass.).
*——— (1941): "National unity and disunity"
*——— (1946): "The P1 P2/D Hypothesis: On the Intercity Movement of Persons." American Sociological Review, vol. 11, Dec, pp. 677
*——— (1949): "Human behavior and the principle of least effort"

External links

* [http://www.ram-verlag.de/g3inh.htm Notes on G.K. Zipf]