He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer (meaning he could teach any subject he chose) at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
He is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely,
where Pn is the frequency of a word ranked nth and the exponent a is almost 1. This means that the second item occurs approximately 1/2 as often as the first, and the third item 1/3 as often as the first, and so on. Zipf's discovery of this law in 1935 was one of the first academic studies of word frequency.
Although he originally intended it as a model for linguistics, Zipf later generalized his law to other disciplines. In particular, he observed that the rank vs. frequency distribution of individual incomes in a unified nation approximates this law, and in his 1941 book National Unity and Disunity, he theorized that breaks in this "normal curve of income distribution" portend social pressure for change or revolution.[citation needed]
Mathematics
Zipf did not like mathematics. In his 1932 publication, the author speaks with disdain about mathematical involvement in linguistics, a.o. ibidem, p.21:
... let me say here for the sake of any mathematician who may plan to formulate the ensuing data more exactly, the ability of the highly intense positive to become the highly intense negative, in my opinion, introduces the devil into the formula in the form of
The only mathematical expression Zipf used looks like ab2 = constant, which he "borrowed" from Alfred J. Lotka's 1926 publication.
↑Zipf, G.K. (1932). Selected Studies on the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.
↑
Zipf, George Kingsley (1942). "The Unity of Nature, Least-Action, and Natural Social Science". Sociometry. 5 (1): 48–62. doi:10.2307/2784953. JSTOR2784953.
