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From: bamford@randvax.ARPA (Cliff Bamford)
Newsgroups: net.math
Subject: Request for info on Zipf's law
Message-ID: <1749@randvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 10-Mar-84 13:26:29 EST
Article-I.D.: randvax.1749
Posted: Sat Mar 10 13:26:29 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 13-Mar-84 00:58:28 EST
Organization: Rand Corp., Santa Monica
Lines: 15

This line is for the line gobbler.

Can anyone out there in netland point me to information on Zipf's law?

As I understand it, Zipf sez that for a wide range of naturally-occuring
distributions (like the letters in english text), the product

   (cardinal rank on distribution (eg "e" = 1)) * (number of occurances)

is approximately a constant. I'm interested in applications to fast lookup
of names of human beans. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

	Cliff Bamford
	ARPA: bamford@rand-unix
	UUCP: {decvax, sdcrdcf, vortex}!randvax!bamford