power laws
A power law is a mathematical relationship where one quantity varies as a power of another. In simpler terms, it means that small changes in one thing can lead to large changes in another. For example, in social networks, a few people have many connections while most have only a few. This creates a distribution where the "rich get richer," leading to phenomena like the success of viral content or wealth concentration. Power laws highlight how certain events or objects can dominate in scale or frequency, often resulting in a few outliers shaping a whole system.
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Power laws describe a relationship where one quantity varies as a power of another. In simpler terms, in many natural and social systems, a small number of events or items are extremely common, while many others are rare. For example, in a city's population, a few neighborhoods have a lot of people, but many have just a few. This results in a graph that, when plotted, shows a straight line on a log-log scale. Power laws appear in various fields, like economics, biology, and technology, indicating that certain types of distributions are more prevalent than traditional averages would suggest.