[{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/latestnews\/may-aug08\/Zipf","bookmark_desc":"The mystery of Zipf","bookmark_notes":"In our recent Plus article Tasty maths, we introduced Zipf's law. Zipf's law arose out of an analysis of language by linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who theorised that given a large body of language (that is, a long book \u2014 or every word uttered by Plus employees during the day), the frequency of each word is close to inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. That is: $ P_ n propto 1\/n^ a $ where a is close to 1. This is known as a \"power law\" and suggests that the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. A famous study of the Brown Corpus found that its words accorded to Zipf's law quite well, with \"the\" being the most frequently occurring word (accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences \u2014 69,971 out of slightly over 1 million), and \"of\" the second most frequent (3.5% of all words).","ub_date":"1229030435","bookmark_date":"1222417871","tags_str":"language<\/a>, maths<\/a>","se_id":"the-mystery-of-zipf","user_name":"davidar","user_img":"","user_count":"1"},{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/latestnews\/may-aug05\/adios","bookmark_desc":"Machine prose","bookmark_notes":"Given a piece of text in any language, the program called ADIOS - automatic distillation of structure - searches for patterns and structures which it then generalises to produce new and meaningful sentences. The ADIOS algorithm is based on statistical and algebraic methods performed on one of the most basic and versatile objects of mathematics - the graph.","ub_date":"1229030435","bookmark_date":"1222417871","tags_str":"language<\/a>, maths<\/a>","se_id":"machine-prose","user_name":"davidar","user_img":"","user_count":"1"},{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/latestnews\/jan-apr05\/speechless","bookmark_desc":"Speechless maths","bookmark_notes":"Here you are, reading an article in a magazine about mathematics. This shows that know how to read and that you are interested in maths. But could you still do maths even if you could not make sense of sentences?","ub_date":"1229030435","bookmark_date":"1222417871","tags_str":"language<\/a>, maths<\/a>","se_id":"speechless-maths","user_name":"davidar","user_img":"","user_count":"1"},{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/issue44\/features\/varley","bookmark_desc":"Evolutionary maths","bookmark_notes":"What is it that makes the human mind so unique and us humans so different from the other species we share this planet with? One thing that is universally present throughout human cultures, but absent in all other species, is language. Over the last few decades evolutionary psychologists have become increasingly interested in the role that language might have in enabling other functions in the human behavioural and cognitive repertoire. Some have argued that language is in fact a prerequisite for a whole range of other intellectual activities, including mathematics.","ub_date":"1229030435","bookmark_date":"1222417871","tags_str":"language<\/a>, maths<\/a>","se_id":"evolutionary-maths","user_name":"davidar","user_img":"","user_count":"1"},{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/issue4\/grimmett","bookmark_desc":"What a coincidence!","bookmark_notes":"","ub_date":"1228858064","bookmark_date":"1221889800","tags_str":"","se_id":"what-a-coincidence","user_name":"cyskonsyght","user_img":"fwy_icon_01.jpg","user_count":"1"},{"data_type":"bookmark","bookmark_url":"http:\/\/plus.maths.org\/issue38\/features\/nishiyama","bookmark_desc":"Mysterious Number 6174","bookmark_notes":"","ub_date":"1229027083","bookmark_date":"1207837164","tags_str":"math<\/a>","se_id":"mysterious-number-6174","user_name":"btocher","user_img":"763678.jpg","user_count":"1"}]