George Kingsley Zipf

We have to turn to the mathematics of complex systems: power laws and fractals.

Zipf's law is a power law, right? Explain that.

George Kingsley Zipf was a linguist in the 1930s.

He found that the most frequently used word in English, the, accounts for about seven percent of all words.

The second most frequent, of, accounts for three and a half percent, exactly half.

Exactly.

That creates a steep L-shaped curve, not a bell.

And Zipf's law describes city populations, earthquakes, wealth distribution, and extreme stock market movements.

What is a power law? Tell us about George Zip's observation about geography.

George Zipf's law says that when you rank cities by their population size, the second city is going to be half the size of the largest city population.

The third city is going to be one third the size and so on.

When you do group countries with large numbers of cities, you do get a result that approximates

However, there is proof that he likely didn't write the manuscript himself.

Let's take a look at Zipf's law.

It's basically a law about how often words show up in a language and whether they follow a predictable pattern.

The most common word, like the in English, is used about twice as often as the next most common word, of, three times as often as the third and, and so on.

This is common with most languages out there, and when applied to the manuscript, it follows Zipf's law.

That possibility rules out both graphomania and glossolalia, as they usually produce chaotic output without consistent structure.

However, does that rule out a hoax? Gordon Rugg, a researcher who's been poking at this mystery for over a decade, claims that the manuscript's content is very possible to fake.

And more importantly, they follow Zip's law.

It shows up in a huge number of languages.

So who discovered this pattern? Well, the law gets its name from a Harvard linguist named George Kingsley Zipf.

And here's my favorite part.

He apparently wasn't a huge fan of math.