social forecasting: 2010

Power law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the number or frequency of an object or event varies as a power of some attribute of that object (e.g., its size), the number or 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. Power laws govern a wide variety of natural and man-made phenomena, including frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares, the sizes of power outages, earthquakes, and wars, the popularity of books and music, and many other quantities. It has good applications in marketing.