Showing posts with label zipf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zipf. Show all posts

5.20.2009

neat bit on cities and mathematics

Here's a poetic concept about the scale economies in three dimensional infrastructure:

In cities, per capita infrastructure grows in proportion to the .7 power of population.  So the bigger the city, the less infrastructure per person is needed.  This same mathematical relationship seems to exist in animals, so we're likely observing the symptoms of deep seated organizational relationships.