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#zipf'slaw#powerlaw#informationtheory

The Zipf Mystery

Vsauce

25M subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

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Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

28M views11 years ago4 recommendations

Computer scienceComputation and complexity

Michael Stevens explores Zipf's law, the mysterious mathematical pattern where word frequency is inversely proportional to its rank.

Support Vsauce, your brain, Alzheimer's research, and other YouTube educators by joining THE CURIOSITY BOX: a seasonal delivery of viral science toys made by Vsauce! A portion of all proceeds goes to Alzheimer's research and our Inquisitive Fellowship, a program that gives money and resources directly to rising STEM channels here on YouTube! curiositybox.com twitter.com/tweetsauce instagram.com/electricpants WordCount.org wordcount.org/ How many days have you been alive? beatcanvas.com/daysalive.asp random letter generator: dave-reed.com/Nifty/randSeq.html Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: youtube.com/user/obscuresorrows Word frequency resources: [lemmatized] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English uow.edu.au/~dlee/corpora.htm wordfrequency.info anc.org/data/anc-second-release/frequency-data/ titania.bham.ac.uk/docs/ kilgarriff.co.uk/bnc-readme.html#raw en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/ [PDF] wordfrequency.info/files/entries.pdf [combined Wikipedia and Gutenberg] monlp.com/2012/04/16/calculating-word-and-n-gram-statistics-… corpus.byu.edu/coca/files/100k_samples.txt corpus.byu.edu/ corpus.leeds.ac.uk/list.html books.google.co.uk/books?id=ja1_AAAAQBAJ&dq=word+frequency+c… ling.helsinki.fi/kit/2009s/clt231/NLTK/book/ch01-LanguagePro… Great Zipf's law papers: colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2014zipfs.pdf ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/sign708.pdf arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412004.pdf www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/courses/2006/cmplxsys899/powerl… Zipf’s law articles and discussions: theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/seeing-around-corne… io9.com/the-mysterious-law-that-governs-the-size-of-your-cit… plus.maths.org/content/os/latestnews/may-aug08/food/index judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/math-and-the-city/?em plus.maths.org/content/mystery-zipf?src=aop datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/why-zipf-s-law-explain… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law other Zipf’s law PDFs ftp.iza.org/dp3928.pdf arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2965.pdf arxiv.org/pdf/1104.3199.pdf lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/zipfjrh.pdf ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834740/#pone.0009411-Mande… polymer.bu.edu/hes/articles/pgs02a.pdf in untranslated language: arxiv.org/pdf/0808.2904.pdf pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/zipf.pdf hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/ranking.html statweb.stanford.edu/~owen/courses/306a/ZipfAndGutenberg.pdf arxiv.org/pdf/1310.0448v3.pdf kor

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an engaging introduction to Zipf's law and power-law distributions in language and nature.

Baeocystinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “German for Programmers”

I won't say it's easy , but it's easier than you might think. Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, link to this video is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
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sillysaurusxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Any number can start a factorial”

Your shock is warranted. It's actually a very deep question, called the Zipf mystery: link to this video No one really knows why it's true. It's also true across physical constants, not just artificial quantities made up by humans. The same type of distribution pops up in language, in nature, in numbers, popularity of opening chess moves, everywhere.
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WhateverHappnson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Embrace the Grind”

…which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.( link ) and here's an interesting video about it: link to this video…
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its_ethanon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The mysterious maths at work in the Tour de France”

There's an entertaining "V-Sauce" video about Zipf's law for anyone wanting to learn a bit more about it and to see other examples of where it shows up: link to this video
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dredmorbiuson Hacker News • Mentions

On “‘Success’ on YouTube Still Means a Life of Poverty”

Mass-publishing markets are very strongly given to power-law distributions. We hear that "anybody can be famous" (or successful, or ...), but everybody cannot be famous. Attention and publicity are the ultimate zero-sum games: no matter how large a given talent pool, there will only ever be ten top-ten spots, 100 top-100 spots. All you're doing by enlarging the pool is amplifying the competition for those spots. There's another side to the equation, though, which is the scope of the audience . Prior to modern technological methods, and I'm including here everything from relatively modern printing (say, 19th century onward), as well as phonograph, cinema, radio, television, and sound amplific…
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sillysaurus3on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs”

It's a deeper reason than that. Humans are hardwired to start with short symbols. Picture a group of humans who evolve a new language. That language will likely start with short sounds, and then progressively build up to longer sounds. link to this video Anyone who hasn't read A Mathematical Theory of Communication, you're missing out. It's quite readable and quite cool: link
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robbedpeteron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Unzipping Zipf’s Law (2017)”

…f you loosen the definitions to use the rules of any given system as syntax and the relationships between atomic units over time as semantics, you could possibly derive a formula that answers the question of what Zipf's law actually is, insofar as there's some universal rule that governs the distributions of units within systems that have entropy. link to this video…
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cowtoolson Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Internet needs the InterPlanetary File System”

The majority of seeding/downloading will be done with the (minority) most popular files, while only a minority of seeding/downloading is done for the majority of files. For example, go to TPB and look at the distribution of seeders/leechers. link to this video
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O__________Oon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law (Winter 2006) [pdf]”

Found the examples of power laws starting on page-5 interesting; all the following follow power law: Word frequency, Citations of scientific papers, Web hits, Copies of books sold, Telephone calls, Magnitude of earthquakes, Diameter of moon craters, Intensity of solar flares, Intensity of wars, Wealth of the richest people, Frequencies of family names, Populations of cities, etc. Terence Tao also has a post on it here from 2009: - Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution link Vsause has video on it too: - link to this video
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