Chaining and the temporal dynamics of scientists' publishing behaviour.

Scientific progress, or scientific change, has been an important topic in the philosophy and history of science. Previous work has developed quantitative approaches to characterize the progression of science in different fields, but how individual scientists make progress through their careers is not well understood at a comprehensive scale. We characterize the regularity in the temporal dynamics of scientists' publishing behavior with computational algorithms that predict the historical emerging order of publications from individual scientists. We discover that scientists publish in ways following the processes of chaining that mirror those observed in historical word meaning extension, whereby novel ideas emerge by connecting to existing ideas that are proximal in semantic space. We report findings for predominant exemplar-based chaining that reconstructs the emerging order in the publications of 1,164 award-winning and random-sampled scientists from the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, and Computer Science over the past century. Our work provides large-scale evidence that scientists across different fields tend to share similar publishing behavior over time by taking incremental steps that build on their past research outputs.

Numeral Systems Across Languages Support Efficient Communication: From Approximate Numerosity to Recursion.

Languages differ qualitatively in their numeral systems. At one extreme, some languages have a small set of number terms, which denote approximate or inexact numerosities; at the other extreme, many languages have forms for exact numerosities over a very large range, through a recursively defined counting system. Why do numeral systems vary as they do? Here, we use computational analyses to explore the numeral systems of 30 languages that span this spectrum. We find that these numeral systems all reflect a functional need for efficient communication, mirroring existing arguments in other semantic domains such as color, kinship, and space. Our findings suggest that cross-language variation in numeral systems may be understood in terms of a shared functional need to communicate precisely while using minimal cognitive resources.