The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small.
For example, in sets which obey the law, the number 1 appears as the most significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the most significant digit less than 5% of the time.
By contrast, if the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time.
Benford's law also makes (different) predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on.
It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants,and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature).
It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.
It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938, although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.
It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants,and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature).
It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.
It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938, although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.
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