From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Jul 17 1999 - 14:31:08 MDT
Michael S. Lorrey, <mike@lorrey.com>, writes:
> Because what Nigrini knew--and Alex's brother-in-law clearly didn't--was
> that the digits making up the shop's sales figures should have followed
> a
> mathematical rule discovered accidentally over 100 years ago. Known as
> Benford's law, it is a rule obeyed by a stunning variety of phenomena,
> from
> stock market prices to census data to the heat capacities of chemicals.
> Even
> a ragbag of figures extracted from newspapers will obey the law's
> demands
> that around 30 per cent of the numbers will start with a 1, 18 per cent
> with
> a 2, right down to just 4.6 per cent starting with a 9.
The way I heard it was that people found that the old books of logarithm
tables got dirty fastest on the first pages. This is because more
numbers that people measured in the real world started with 1 than
with 9. Generally, they are distributed evenly by logarithm, not by
arithmetic value.
Hal
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