George Kingsley Zipf

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George Kingsley Zipf (IPA Template:IPA), (1902-1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. He 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,

<math>P_n \sim 1/n^a</math>

where P_n is the frequency of a word ranked n^th 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].

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.

See also

• Benford's law
• Bradford's law
• Lotka's law
• Pareto distribution or Pareto principle or the "80-20 rule"
• Power law

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

External link

• Notes on G.K. Zipfde:George Kingsley Zipf

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