Benford's Law

12/8/2009


                                                              image source


There's something very odd about our number system;
something maddeningly counter-intuitive.

It pertains to the first digit in the numbers we encounter
throughout the day; numbers like street addresses, bills,
and stock prices.

It even pertains to the first digit of the lengths of rivers,
the heights of buildings, the population sizes of cities
and the square roots of integers.

Here's the oddity -

more numbers begin with the digit 1 than with the digit 2,
more begin with the digit 2 than the digit 3, more begin
with 3 than 4 ...... and more with an 8 than a 9.

Approximately 30% of real world numbers begin with
the digit 1; and a number is six times more likely to have
a 1 as its first digit than a 9.

This phenomenon goes by the name of Benford's Law.

You can bend your mind pondering its mathematical
basis and the kinds of number sets it applies to by
checking out sites like these -  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.


Posted in Facts-Figures

Comments

Soo strange.. it has nothing to do with the fact that we label things in the world sequentially.. no.. nothing at all.
Posted by Dave on 1/22/2010 8:28:09 PM
@Dave - do some research! Benford's Law only applies to data sets which span multiple orders of magnitude
Posted by Chris on 3/12/2010 9:44:52 PM
@Chris - you might want to read those yourself, the majority of the items they list are driven in exactly the manner Dave points out. The remainder are so few they fall into the category of 'if some apples are red, then this green apple must be a pear'.
Posted by Kit on 11/16/2010 8:49:10 AM

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