Power Law

A power law is a mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event (e.g. its size), the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary as a power of the size of the population, and hence follows a power law. There is evidence that the distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena follow a power law, including the sizes of earthquakes, craters on the moon and of solar flares, the foraging pattern of various species, the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations, the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the species richness in clades of organisms, the sizes of power outages and wars, and many other quantities.

Read more about Power Law:  Power-law Functions, Power-law Probability Distributions, Validating Power Laws, Note

Famous quotes containing the words power and/or law:

    For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
    Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)

    These, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.
    —Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in Romans, 2:14.