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For a quarter of a century the author has been fascinated by the concept that “considerable insight into the mainsprings of human behavior
might be gained if it were viewed purely as a natural phenomenon like everything else in the universe.” He has, he says, spent some six years writing this book. His efforts and thinking are not at all as isolated as would appear at first glance. The work of C. Reinhold Noyes in economics, Norbert Weiner in electrophysics and mathematics, Von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern's work on the mathematical theory of games of chance, A. J. Lotka on population analysis, J. Q. Stewart on “social physics”—all bear witness to a trend which is steadily growing and will one day be an important factor in a scientific attack on the fundamental laws of human behavior and structure. This trend represents a mathematical study of human behavior.—There are scientists who feel that the social life of man can no longer remain beyond the pale. Even this aspect of life is a natural phenomenon like atoms, falling bodies, silk-weaving and ballistics, and should be studied as such with every instrument at our command. The question of finding ways and means for decisions in national and international affairs is not the least of the pressures for studying and finding, if they exist, the fundamental, unifying laws of social behavior as well as individual behavior.
Doctor Zipf is a university lecturer at Harvard, holding one of the four prize university appointments reserved for scholars who have done pioneer research on the frontiers of their fields of specialization. He is a well-known philologist who has gradually found himself working more and more in the areas of human ecology, social conduct and individual behavior structure. His background then is one of language, speech and semantics. From a study of language, both as an individual psychological expression and as a social phenomenon, he has sought to give some unifying expression on an empiric basis to c