George Kingsley Zipf
George Kingsley Zipf (SAMPA [zIf]), (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 Pn is the frequency of a word ranked nth and a is almost 1. This means that a word that occurs 10 times more frequently than another word that is ranked 10 less.
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
Bibliography
- George K. Zipf, Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least-Effort, Addison-Wesley, Cambridge MA, 1949
