George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf ( ; January 7, 1902 – September 25, 1950) was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages.

Zipf earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, and also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin.

He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer (meaning he could teach any subject he chose) at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data. Provided by Wikipedia