Benford's law: a mathematical oddity for the unscrupulous

[lord_semjaza]

Should anyone want to cheat on their tax form or an insurance or expenses claim, here's a tip for them: make sure that 27.3% of the numbers you invent start with '1'. Or possibly '2

Comments

[darknessrisible]

Benford's law simply states that the fractional part of log X is uniformly distributed. Write a program to generate a list of random numbers and exponentiate them, and they'll follow Benford's law too. Which is not actually an explanation of why it works...

Such quantities as the first digit of 1/(2^{n}) expressed in decimal (or any base which is not a power of 2) also follow Benford's law, for reasons which are actually quite well understood.

[lord_semjaza]

Aah, I'm with ya there, and I understand why it works (although that took me a while), I just think it's quite immensely counter-intuitive the first time you hear about it. ;)

[armyoftwo]

Sorry, random comment on other entry - Hiiii. Was reading bad sex, stupidly amused by your shit-streaked sex story, went in for a little stalkage as a result. Which will probably continue. Only on a small scale, mind, I'm quite lazy.

[lord_semjaza]

S'much appreciated.. glad someone else found the whole sordid story amusing. ;)

Unfortunately, most of my LJ isn't all that interesting. I tend to gloss over the sex and general debauchery as a rule.. though I've got a backlog of stuff to post to bad_sex eventually.