Numbers Law

Guess I took a little blogging vacation there. Either that, or I just didn't have a very exciting week.

In any case, I just found an article on Digg that I thought I'd share with you. You can check it out right here.

Apparently, many sets of numbers follow Benford's Logarithmic Law. The gist is that more numbers start with 1 than 2, more with 2 than 3, more with 3 than 4, and so on, right down to 9, which has the fewest number of representatives. And these ratios are predicted by Benford's Law. Weird, huh? What sorts of sets of numbers follow this law? All kinds of them, apparently. They start out talking about house numbers. Also included are birth rates, census numbers, the area of countries and many others. Who would have thought?

Want to know how two researchers discovered this independently of each other? They noticed that books of logarithmic tables in the libraries that they frequented were more worn at the beginning, where the smaller numbers come into play.

Crazy, huh?

Why this happens has yet to be explained.