Announcing the

6th Department of Mathematics and Statistics COLLOQUIUM

Day, Date and Time:

Place:

The Speaker:

Title:

On the size distribution of incomes, forest fires, cities, oil fields and other phenomena.

Abstract:

Data on incomes, wildfires, human settlements and oil fields indicate that these phenomena have very similar size distributions. Is there an underlying reason for the commonality? In this talk I will explore this question, by viewing each as an example of a stochastic process that is stopped (or `killed') in a random way. I will present some results on income distributions which provide an explanation and an extension of Pareto's Law of Incomes, and which lead to a new parametric income distribution model. This model can also explain Zipf's Law (or the rank-size law) for the sizes of cities, towns and villages. For forest fires and oil fields I will present results showing the excellent fit of a model derived from percolation theory.