The Fractalist
by Benoit Mandelbrot · 30 Oct 2012
, the first part presented a subject that did not yet exist, and my main goal was not to help linguistics become mathematical but to explain Zipf’s law. Why the rush? At a meeting in London, I had been offered a postdoc at MIT. The desire to take off pushed me to cram
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words
this relationship in a number of systems in the 1930s and summarized them in his famous book Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Zipf’s law, as scientists came to call it, is actually only one example among many of a “power law.” To take language as an example, a power
Think Complexity
by Allen B. Downey · 23 Feb 2012 · 247pp · 43,430 words
. Small World Graphs Analysis of Graph Algorithms FIFO Implementation Stanley Milgram Watts and Strogatz Dijkstra What Kind of Explanation Is That? 5. Scale-Free Networks Zipf’s Law Cumulative Distributions Continuous Distributions Pareto Distributions Barabási and Albert Zipf, Pareto, and Power Laws Explanatory Models 6. Cellular Automata Stephen Wolfram Implementing CAs CADrawer Classifying
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil · 23 Sep 2019
words with, predictably, le, la, les in the lead and, less predictably, en in 10th place (Estoup 1916). By far the most enduring application of Zipf’s law has been to study the ranking of cities by their population size: for any historical period, these distributions are approximated as a simple inverse power
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West · 15 May 2017 · 578pp · 168,350 words
urban studies than in either biology or physics. There was, however, one major exception to this and that is a famous scaling law known as Zipf’s law for the ranking of cities in terms of their population size. This is shown graphically in Figure 39. It’s an intriguing observation: in its
The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson · 7 Mar 2006 · 364pp · 101,286 words
gently, so rare words happen more often than they otherwise might. Zipf asserted that α is 1. In fact, there are many empirical problems with Zipf’s “law,” as some call it; not least of them is that it simply does not accurately reflect what happens in real language. But it proved interesting
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable
by James Owen Weatherall · 2 Jan 2013 · 338pp · 106,936 words
a famously eccentric character and few took him seriously. He had spent his career arguing for a universal law of physical, social, and linguistic phenomena. Zipf’s law said that if you constructed a list of all the things in some natural category, say, all of the cities in France, or all of
Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell · 31 Mar 2009 · 524pp · 120,182 words
the first, the third about one-third as often, and so forth. This relation is now called Zipf’s law, and is perhaps the most famous of known power laws. FIGURE 17.4. An illustration of Zipf’s law using Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” monologue. There have been many different explanations proposed
The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone · 3 Jun 2019 · 283pp · 81,376 words
a way of convincing ourselves that the statistics apply to other people, other enterprises. We all think we’re special. Most of us are wrong. Zipf’s Law George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950) was a Harvard linguist whose nerdish obsession was the relative frequencies of words. Living before the age of computers, he
Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen · 25 Jul 2011 · 298pp · 43,745 words
exponents. The power law distribution (i.e., the exponent) that we are most concerned with in sponsored search, especially for keyphrase selection, is known as Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s law Zipf’s Law takes its name from the linguist George Kingsley Zipf who proposed and popularized it [62], although the relationship between words and their frequency of use
Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV
by Shelly Palmer · 14 Apr 2006 · 406pp · 88,820 words
Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning
by James Pustejovsky and Amber Stubbs · 14 Oct 2012 · 502pp · 107,510 words
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder · 8 Sep 2014 · 366pp · 76,476 words
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less
by Richard Koch · 15 Dec 1999 · 296pp · 78,227 words
Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page · 27 Nov 2018 · 543pp · 153,550 words
The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching
by Donald Ervin Knuth · 15 Jan 1998
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts · 1 Feb 2003 · 379pp · 113,656 words
When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt · 14 May 2018 · 436pp · 127,642 words
Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida · 28 Jun 2009 · 325pp · 73,035 words
Mining the Social Web: Finding Needles in the Social Haystack
by Matthew A. Russell · 15 Jan 2011 · 541pp · 109,698 words
Think OCaml
by Nicholas Monje, Allen Downey
Natural language processing with Python
by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper · 15 Dec 2009 · 504pp · 89,238 words
Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil · 2 Mar 2021 · 1,324pp · 159,290 words
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker · 24 Sep 2012 · 1,351pp · 385,579 words
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg · 15 Nov 2010 · 1,535pp · 337,071 words
Mining of Massive Datasets
by Jure Leskovec, Anand Rajaraman and Jeffrey David Ullman · 13 Nov 2014
Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food
by Catherine Shanahan M. D. · 2 Jan 2017 · 659pp · 190,874 words
Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher · 1 Jul 2009
Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 6 Nov 2012 · 256pp · 60,620 words
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks · 8 Mar 2011 · 487pp · 151,810 words
Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead
by Kenneth Rogoff · 27 Feb 2025 · 330pp · 127,791 words
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 14 Jul 2012 · 299pp · 92,782 words
A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market
by John Allen Paulos · 1 Jan 2003 · 295pp · 66,824 words
Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought
by Barbara Tversky · 20 May 2019 · 426pp · 117,027 words
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
by David Bellos · 10 Oct 2011 · 396pp · 107,814 words
The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman · 24 Sep 2018
Beautiful Visualization
by Julie Steele · 20 Apr 2010
Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter · 18 Jun 2018 · 276pp · 81,153 words
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill · 27 Jul 2015 · 293pp · 81,183 words
The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards · 7 Apr 2014 · 466pp · 127,728 words
Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards · 10 Nov 2011 · 381pp · 101,559 words
Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins · 7 Aug 2011 · 339pp · 112,979 words
The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky · 14 Sep 2015 · 270pp · 79,180 words
This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman · 14 Feb 2012 · 416pp · 106,582 words
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner · 16 Feb 2023 · 353pp · 97,029 words
Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger · 3 Jun 2019
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words
Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens · 11 Mar 2013 · 349pp · 114,038 words