Idiosyncrasy as an explanation for power laws in nature

Abstract

Complex systems theory pays much attention to simple mechanisms producing nontrivial patterns, especially power laws. However, power laws with exponent close to one also result from complex mixtures of mechanisms that, in isolation, would not necessarily give this type of distribution. Probably, both paths to the power law are relevant in nature. The second gives a plausible explanation for some instances of power laws emerging in extremely complex systems, such as ecosystems.Comment: To be published in Trends in Mathematics. 6 pages, 0 figure