A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities

gizmodo.com · 1,440 words · saved by 1 readers

For the past century, an obscure mathematical principle called Zipf's law has predicted the size of mega-cities all over the world. And nobody knows why.

For the past century, an obscure mathematical principle called Zipf’s law has predicted the size of mega-cities all over the world. And nobody knows why. Illustration by Algol via Shutterstock Back in 1949, the linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used very rarely. If he ranked the words in order of popularity, a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word, and three times as…

A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities

related reading