Zipf's Law
applied
The best known instance of Zipf's law applies the frequency table of words in text or corpus of natural language (wikipedia)
Introduction
" Zipf’s Law, a mathematically simple and elegant distribution that describes the relationship between the frequency of words in a language and their rank. Simply put, the most common word will occur about twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, and so on."
Guiding Questions
- What mathematical models apply to this situation?
- What data do you need to collect and how will you analyze it?
- What assumptions are you making in your mathematical model?
- How can you validate your mathematical conclusions?
- What are the limitations of your approach?
Key Mathematical Concepts
Linguistics
Power Laws
Statistical Patterns
Zipf's Law