Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law

Many of the things that scientists measure have a typical size or “scale”—a typical value around which individual measurements are centred. A simple example would be the heights of human beings. Most adult human beings are about 180cm tall. There is some variation around this figure, notably depending on sex, but we never see people who are 10cm tall, or 500cm. To make this observation more quantitative, one can plot a histogram of people’s heights, as I have done in Fig. 1a. The figure shows the heights in centimetres of adult men in the United States measured between 1959 and 1962, and indeed the distribution is relatively narrow and peaked around 180cm. Another telling observation is the ratio of the…

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  National Science Foundation

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