Zipf–Mandelbrot law
Have you ever heard of the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law? It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's actually a simple way of describing something that happens a lot in our world.
You know how when you read a book or listen to music or watch TV, there are some words or songs or characters that come up a lot, and others that you only hear once in a while? Well, the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law is a way of describing that pattern, and it's named after two mathematicians who studied this phenomenon a long time ago.
The basic idea is this: if you take a big list of words or songs or characters or anything, and you rank them in order from most common to least common, you'll find that the most common ones are way more common than the rest. For example, in a book, the word "the" might appear hundreds or even thousands of times, while other words like "pomegranate" or "bellicose" might only appear once or twice.
This pattern is called a "power law," which means that the frequency of words (or songs or characters or anything) decreases exponentially as you move down the list. That means that the second most common thing on the list is only about half as common as the first, the third is only about a third as common as the first, and so on.
This might seem like a weird thing to study, but it actually has a lot of applications in all kinds of fields, from linguistics to computer science to economics. And even if you're not a scientist, you can probably appreciate the fact that some things just pop up again and again in our lives, while others are more rare and special.
You know how when you read a book or listen to music or watch TV, there are some words or songs or characters that come up a lot, and others that you only hear once in a while? Well, the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law is a way of describing that pattern, and it's named after two mathematicians who studied this phenomenon a long time ago.
The basic idea is this: if you take a big list of words or songs or characters or anything, and you rank them in order from most common to least common, you'll find that the most common ones are way more common than the rest. For example, in a book, the word "the" might appear hundreds or even thousands of times, while other words like "pomegranate" or "bellicose" might only appear once or twice.
This pattern is called a "power law," which means that the frequency of words (or songs or characters or anything) decreases exponentially as you move down the list. That means that the second most common thing on the list is only about half as common as the first, the third is only about a third as common as the first, and so on.
This might seem like a weird thing to study, but it actually has a lot of applications in all kinds of fields, from linguistics to computer science to economics. And even if you're not a scientist, you can probably appreciate the fact that some things just pop up again and again in our lives, while others are more rare and special.