MINERAL SPECIES FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION AND WORD FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION COMPARISON

In this poster presentation, we introduce a statistical analysis of word frequency distributions. The word frequency distribution is a large number of rare events distribution, characterized by numerous rare words and a few common words, like the words “the”, “and”, and “a”. We analyze Lewis Carroll’s book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and calculate the vocabulary size of the author. Subsequently, we compare the word frequency distribution with the mineral species frequency distribution, where the words in the text plays the same role as the mineral species-locality pairs. A similar analysis provides an estimate of the total number of mineral species on Earth for subgroups of minerals.