Zipf's law from a Fisher variational-principle

Abstract

Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example we show that the number of citations found in the most referenced physics journals follows this law.

References in corpus (4)

• Critical Behavior in Light Nuclear Systems: Experimental Aspects
• Empirical Tests of Zipf's law Mechanism In Open Source Linux Distribution
• Competitive cluster growth in complex networks
• Zipf's law in Nuclear Multifragmentation and Percolation Theory

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• Unravelling the size distribution of social groups with information theory on complex networks