Concept
Zipf's law
Related concepts (15)
Principle of least effort
The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, and even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort." It is closely related to many other similar principles (see principle of least action or other articles listed below). This is perhaps best known, or at least documented, among researchers in the field of library and information science.
Brevity law
In linguistics, the brevity law (also called Zipf's law of abbreviation) is a linguistic law that qualitatively states that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter that word tends to be, and vice versa; the less frequently a word is used, the longer it tends to be. This is a statistical regularity that can be found in natural languages and other natural systems and that claims to be a general rule. The brevity law was originally formulated by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1945 as a negative correlation between the frequency of a word and its size.
Scale invariance
In physics, mathematics and statistics, scale invariance is a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables, are multiplied by a common factor, and thus represent a universality. The technical term for this transformation is a dilatation (also known as dilation). Dilatations can form part of a larger conformal symmetry. In mathematics, scale invariance usually refers to an invariance of individual functions or curves.
Riemann zeta function
The Riemann zeta function or Euler–Riemann zeta function, denoted by the Greek letter ζ (zeta), is a mathematical function of a complex variable defined as for , and its analytic continuation elsewhere. The Riemann zeta function plays a pivotal role in analytic number theory, and has applications in physics, probability theory, and applied statistics. Leonhard Euler first introduced and studied the function over the reals in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Logarithm
In mathematics, the logarithm is the inverse function to exponentiation. That means that the logarithm of a number x to the base b is the exponent to which b must be raised to produce x. For example, since 1000 = 103, the logarithm base 10 of 1000 is 3, or log10 (1000) = 3. The logarithm of x to base b is denoted as logb (x), or without parentheses, logb x, or even without the explicit base, log x, when no confusion is possible, or when the base does not matter such as in big O notation.