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Mathematics and computation

Mathematics and computation

The physics of languages

13 Jun 2023

Much like biological species, languages spread, evolve, compete and even go extinct. To understand these mechanisms, physicists are applying their methods to linguistics, creating the interdisciplinary field of language dynamics, as Marco Patriarca, Els Heinsalu and David Sánchez explain

World map made of colourful speech bubbles
(Courtesy: iStock/Qvasimodo)
If the world of research were an ecosystem, with scientists of different disciplines representing di

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Marco Patriarca and Els Heinsalu are senior researchers in the ComplexSimplex group at the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, Tallinn, Estonia. David Sánchez is a professor at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Majorca, Spain. Marco Patriarca and Els Heinsalu are co-authors (with Jean Leo Leonard) of Languages in Space and Time: Models and Methods from Complex Systems Theory (2020 Cambridge University Press). E-mail marco.patriarca@gmail.com, els.heinsalu@kbfi.ee, david.sanchez@uib.es
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