M.V. Simkin, V.P. Roychowdhury
Scientists often re-invent things which were long known. Here we review these activities as related to the mechanism of producing power law distributions, originally proposed in 1922 by Yule to explain experimental data on the sizes of biological genera, collected by Willis. We estimate that scientists are busy re-discovering America about 2/3 of time.
I. Szendro, J. López, and M. Rodr\'ıguez. Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)
J. Ewen, P. Gaspard, T. Bocarmé, and N. Kruse. Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)