BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ZIPF LAW 1)2)

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A numeric correlation between the frequency of occurence of different words in a language.

Zipf showed that the most common word ("the" in English) occurs 10 times more than the 10th more common word, 100 times more often that the 100th most common word, and so forth.

This intriguing feature seems to be a quite general property, probably correlated to fractals and renormalization properties.

Recently, some genetists found that noncoding DNA (so called ""junk" DNA) follows the ZIPF relation, i.e. has the structure of a language (Ph. YAM, Scientific American. vol 272, 3, 1995)

Zipf Law is obviously a power law, as it applies to the same general type of phenomena, for instance in the use of words in a language, or in the number of cities as ranked by their population. It reflects a collective property emerging from a statistical behavior or relation among numerous elements of similar individual characteristics within a class or a region.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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