"The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows."
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Math and the City (via iamdanw)
Fun fact: Zipf’s law, named for the selfsame Zipf, says the same thing about corpus linguistics: ”[it] states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.” Like a great linguist, Zipf was able to find similar formal relationships in disparate objects of study.
