Power law  In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another. For instance, considering the area of a square in terms of the length of its side, if the length is doubled, the area is multiplied by a factor of four. The distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena approximately follow a power law over a wide range of magnitudes: these include the sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares, the foraging pattern of various species, the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations, the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the species richness in clades of organisms, the sizes of power outages, criminal charges per convict, volcanic eruptions, human judgements of stimulus intensity and many other quantities. Few empirical distributions fit a power law for all their values, but rather follow a power law in the tail. Acoustic attenuation follows frequency power-laws within wide frequency bands for many complex media. Allometric scaling laws for relationships between biological variables are among the best known power-law functions in nature. One attribute of power laws is their scale invariance. Given a relation formula_1, scaling the argument formula_2 by a constant factor formula_3 causes only a proportionate scaling of the function itself. That is,  where formula_5 denotes direct proportionality. That is, scaling by a constant formula_3 simply multiplies the original power-law relation by the constant formula_7. Thus, it follows that all power laws with a particular scaling exponent are equivalent up to constant factors, since each is simply a scaled version of the others. This behavior is what produces the linear relationship when logarithms are taken of both formula_8 and formula_2, and the straight-line on the log–log plot is often called the "signature" of a power law. With real data, such straightness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the data following a power-law relation. In fact, there are many ways to generate finite amounts of data that mimic this signature behavior, but, in their asymptotic limit, are not true power laws (e.g., if the generating process of some data follows a Log-normal distribution). Thus, accurately fitting and validating power-law models is an active area of research in statistics; see below.