✐ ✐ “imvol2” — 2006/4/12 — 14:05 — page 525 — #1 ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ Internet Mathematics Vol. 2, No. 4: 525-534 Editorial: The Future of Power Law Research Michael Mitzenmacher Abstract. I argue that power law research must move from focusing on observation, in- terpretation, and modeling of power law behavior to instead considering the challenging problems of validation of models and control of systems. 1. The Problem with Power Law Research To begin, I would like to recall a humorous insight from the paper of Fabrikant, Koutsoupias, and Papadimitriou [Fabrikant et al. 01], consisting of this quote and the following footnote. “Power laws ... have been termed ‘the signature of human activity’...” 1 The study of power laws, especially in networks, has clearly exploded over the last decade, with seemingly innumerable papers and even popular books, such asBarab´asi’s Linked [Barab´ asi 02] and Watts’ Six Degrees [Watts 03]. Power laws are, indeed, everywhere. Despite this remarkable success, I believe that research into power laws in computer networks (and networks more generally) suffers from glaring deficiencies that need to be addressed by the community. Coping with these deficiencies should lead to another great burst of exciting and compelling research. To explain the problem, I would like to make an analogy to the area of string theory. String theory is incredibly rich and beautiful mathematically, with a simple and compelling basic starting assumption: the universe’s build- ing blocks do not really correspond to (zero-dimensional) points, but to small 1 “They are certainly the product of one particular kind of human activity: looking for power laws...” [Fabrikant et al. 01] © A K Peters, Ltd. 1542-7951/05 $0.50 per page 525
