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:
“Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The law cannot be enforced when everyone is an offender.”
—Chinese proverb.