Law, Probability and Risk

Zipf's law and L. Levin's probability distributions

Zipf’s law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation. In this paper I suggest that at least in certain situations, Zipf’s law can be explained as a special case of the a priori distribution introduced and studied...

Probability and Statistics in the Law

Risk and the law.

We have to buckle up when we drive. We are no longer allowed to take scissors or pocket knives in our hand luggage when we fly. Cars have to fulfil a range of safety requirements to be allowed on the streets. Our food must be free of pathogens or any other harmful residues—fast food shops even label coffee cups to warn consumers that the content is hot. There are many who complain that we now l...

Probability Assessment and Risk Management of Progressive Collapse in Strategic Buildings Facing Blast Loads

Nowadays, as a result of increased terrorist and bomb attacks throughout the globe in the vicinity of strategic buildings, designing these structures against impact loads, particularly the blast-related ones, has been taken into more consideration. The current procedure for designing the structure against an explosion is a design against the local failure of the current elements in the first st...

Risk relativism and physical law.

In two 1959 papers, one coauthored, Jerome Cornfield asserts that 'relative' measures are more useful for causal inference while 'absolute' measures are more useful for public health purposes. In one of these papers (the single-authored one), he asks how epidemiology should respond to the fact that its domain is not a highly 'articulated' one-it is not susceptible to being subsumed under genera...