What is the Zipf law and how does it relate to math?

[houlahound]

Wow, just wow. Only just stumbled across this so haven't looked at any formal studies but still, wow!

 

[fresh_42]

Keep this link in case someone's asking why the logarithm to the basis $e$ is called natural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Relation_to_the_exponential_distribution

 

[jedishrfu]

Quite interesting, I was curious to find whether it applied to Chinese where words like the, a ... are not used that is you when you say "I read the book" in Chinese there is no "the" it's literally "I read book".

Investigations are more difficult since a word in Chinese may be represented by one or more characters so that you can't just do stats on the character usage alone, instead you need to understand the context.

I found this paper that talks about the issues:

http://www.colips.org/journals/volume18/JCLC_2008_V18_N1_04.pdf

 

[houlahound]

Curious how did you search that paper, I could not turn up much on Dr Google.

I would like to improve my search skills to find more info from the literature.

 

[jedishrfu]

The trick is to use words low on the zips meter so that you'll get more precise hits.

For the search above I used "Chinese zipf law" and it came up on the second hit.

It may be that google uses this trick to improve its search results too but I don't know that. Anyway you might gain some insight from Google search presentation which I just found by luck:

https://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/part-2.html

 

[jedishrfu]

it was also curious that your video had a chart of zipf applied to the mysterious voynich book which has yet to be translated or even proven to be a real document.

 

[houlahound]

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