In any country if you rank all the cities by population, these populations will follow the same pattern worldwide. The law is so strong that you could use this as a geeky party trick: give me the population of the largest city in a country and I will tell you the population of the 50th largest. It is a remarkable feature of cities that their populations follow not only follow a power law, but that the distribution is identical across the planet.
Continue reading “From Suffolk to China: Zipf’s law in action”