George Kingsley Zipf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Kingsley Zipf (IPA [zɪf]), (1902-1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf worked at Harvard University. He worked with the Chinese languages, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet and many other collections of data.
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[edit] 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,
where Pn is the frequency of a word ranked nth and 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. [1].
[edit] See also
- Benford's law
- Bradford's law
- Lotka's law
- Pareto distribution or Pareto principle or the "80-20 rule"
- Power law
[edit] Bibliography
- Zipf, George Kingsley (1932): Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language. Cambridge (Mass.).
- Zipf, George Kingsley (1935): The Psycho-Biology of Language. Cambridge (Mass.).
- Zipf, George Kingsley (1941): National unity and disunity
- Zipf, George Kingsley (1949): Human behavior and the principle of least effort
