linear function

A group of physicists recently collaborated on a statistical survey of words. You may be wondering why physicists are interested in language. In this case, it is not language per se, but how words imitate the statistical patterns of the stock market and animal populations. This group of researchers, led by Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, culled data from Google’s …

Where do the words gift and present come from? Why does English use both? We're pretty sure it's not just so that children can ask for toys in multiple ways ...