
Zipf's law was discovered as an empirical probability distribution
governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. Later
it was observed in many other situations. As Terence Tao recently remarked,
it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.
In this talk I suggest that at least in certain cases, Zipf's law can be explained as
a special case of the a priori distribution introduced and studied by L.~Levin.
The Zipf ranking corresponding to diminishing frequency appears then as the
ordering determined by the growing Kolmogorov complexity.
In my talk, I will explain the basics of theoretical computability theory and
the place of Kolmogorov complexity in it. Extensions of tis construction lead
to interesting new question in the theory of operads.
Links:
[1] http://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/taxonomy/term/39
[2] http://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/node/3444
[3] http://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/node/2804