BBC News - Do mysterious laws link tennis rankings and earthquakes?:
'via Blog this'
Recent studies suggest maths laws may govern everything from the timing of earthquakes to tennis player rankings. But are these rules just a mirage?
In the 1930s, linguist George Kingsley Zipf spotted an unusual trend in languages.
In a given work of literature, the second-most commonly used word occurs half as often as the most-used. The third-most used word occurs one-third as often as the first, and so on.
He had discovered what has become the most widely known "power law".
It was a striking finding - that something as fluid and untamed as language can appear to be so incredibly ordered.
Power laws show up frequently in physics, where mathematical order is no surprise.
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