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Complex systems

Unzipping Zipf's law

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One mathematical model can account for power-law distributions in a variety of systems. Eschewing system-specific assumptions, it utilizes a shared feature of the observed distributions: they all describe the division of items into groups.

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Figure 1: Most frequently occurring words in a novel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lada Adamic is in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1107, USA.,

    Lada Adamic

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  1. Lada Adamic
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Correspondence to Lada Adamic.

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Adamic, L. Unzipping Zipf's law. Nature 474, 164–165 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/474164a

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