A brief history of power law distributions

Various phenomena governed by power law distributions are ubiquitous in nature and society, thus their study carries broad and far－reaching significance. In recent years, by effective physical and mathematical tools and powerful computational faculties, a deeper understanding of the essence of these distributions has emerged. We review briefly the history and current development of research on power law distributions from the perspective of statistical physics, and present a concise discussion of the mechanisms of their generation and their influence on certain dynamic properties.