Mathematics
The law of the leading digit
In large real-world lists, from town populations to river lengths, the first digit is a 1 about 30% of the time and a 9 under 5%, not the even one-in-nine you might expect. The pattern, called Benford's law, appears because quantities that grow by multiplying linger far longer in the low digits.
Sources & further reading
WikipediaBenford's lawThe overview that gives the first-digit shares, the euro-entry Greek data flag, and the origin of the law.Proceedings of the American Philosophical SocietyThe Law of Anomalous NumbersThe 1938 paper that measured the first-digit slope across 20,000 real numbers and gave the law its name.WileyBenford's Law: Applications for Forensic Accounting, Auditing, and Fraud DetectionThe forensic-accounting textbook that turned Benford's law into a standard auditing and fraud-detection tool.
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