Information Theory Meets Power Laws

Acknowledgments

This book recapitulates the path of stubborn research onto which I stepped around year 2000, when I quit physics in favor of computational linguistics and accidentally came across the work of Hilberg (1990), concerning a hypothetical power‐law growth of entropy for natural language. In order to understand it properly, I started learning information theory and related mathematical subjects. Although I mostly wrote research papers alone, it may be difficult to name all important people that may have influenced the general outlook of this book. Let me give a try.

• First, I express my gratitude to my high‐school teachers Olga Stande, Krzysztof Przybyszewski, and Lilianna Szymańska, who stimulated my independent thinking about mathematics, physics, and language, respectively.
• Subsequently, I thank my doctoral mentor Jan Mielniczuk and my former boss Jacek Koronacki, who provided me with a friendly and very patient environment, gave me lots of precious advice, and assisted me in discoveries leading toward the conception of this book, whose first critical readers they were later as well.
• I am grateful to David Adger, Gabriel Altmann, Janusz Bień, Richard Bradley, Mark Braverman, Gregory Chaitin, Alexander Clark, James Crutchfield, Magdalena Derwojedowa, Jarosław Duda, David Feldman, Ramon Ferrer‐i‐Cancho, Richard Futrell, Richard Gill, Peter Grünwald, Michael Hahn, Jan Hajič, Peter Harremoës, Frederick Jelinek, Brunon Kamiński, Reinhard Köhler, Andrzej Komisarski, ...