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George Kingsley Zipf, "Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort”, 1949.

George Kingsley Zipf, “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology”, 1949 was a nonfiction science book.

The “Zipf Law” is a statistical distribution discovered by George Zipf.

This probability distribution is a “linear ranking” statistic that describes a wild range of stochastic phenomena.  I use it in rankings of food choices; as, human food behavior is my interest.

The above table “ranking” 32 food items by the “per capita pounds” annually is an example of Zipfian  law distribution.

Words in a language was the first discovered  Zipfian distribution.  Choose any language and rank the words by frequency of use and the result is a Zipfian distribution (English graph below).

The table above ranks food items; and, rank-number versus percentage of annual food consumption is Zipfian.

 

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