Zipf’s Law in My Second Brain
This nice video on Zipf’s law got me thinking about the seemingly ubiquitous observation of Zipf-like distributions in empirical data. The basic idea is that: If you rank items (words, cities, names, etc.) by how frequently they occur, their frequency is inversely proportional to their rank. We see instances of Zipf’s Law all the time in our research on human mobility: in the distribution of cities by population size, or the frequency of travel between cities....