June 2013
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
8h 12m
English
In this chapter I introduce a class of probability distributions known as power laws, because they have become modeling tools of considerable scope in a plethora of fields, the social and biological sciences among them, and because the literature regarding these distributions is scattered over many different books and journals representing myriad interests and is a little hard to pin down to one reference. A review of some of the salient features belongs in a book devoted to models in the social and biological sciences, as I hope to show, especially since the topic is surprisingly little known to people whose training in probability and statistics is based on the traditional core topics.