Re-inventing Willis

Abstract

Scientists often re-invent things that were long known. Here we review these activities as related to the mechanism of producing power law distributions, originally proposed in 1922 by Yule to explain experimental data on the sizes of biological genera, collected by Willis. We also review the history of re-invention of closely related branching processes, random graphs and coagulation models.

Physics Reports (2011)

References in corpus (4)

• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Kinetic Theory of Random Graphs: from Paths to Cycles
• Self Organized Scale-Free Networks from Merging and Regeneration
• An explanation of the distribution of inter-seizure intervals

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