. . . you might find this interesting. I stumbled across it quite by accident yesterday trying to find information about quaternions and a belt trick.

If you take a large sample of wide-ranging but non-random numbers, you will find that about 30% of them begin with 1; if the digits were truly random you would expect only 1/9 or 11% of them would start with a 1. You can look at the areas of all of the lakes in the world, or populations of cities, or McDonald's daily sales figures, or the numbers you see on the internet in a day, or whatever. And it doesn't matter whether some of the numbers are in square miles and others in hectares (whatever those are, you say), or some are in dollars and others are in yen, or whatever. This phenomenon is known as Benford's Law.

So what? you ask.

Recently, Benford's Law has been used to detect fraud. A computer search of medical claims in a healthcare system turned up an unusually large number beginning with a 6, and a large number of these turned out to be fraudulent.

For the more mathematically inclined, the percentage of numbers beginning with a particular digit is log(1 + 1/d). The percentages are:

1 - 30.1%
2 - 17.6%
3 - 12.5%
4 - 9.7%
5 - 7.9%
6 - 6.7%
7 - 5.8%
8 - 5.1%
9 - 4.6%

 

My head hurts.

 

Thanks for the lesson Magician...I enjoy math, even though I was never great at it.

 

Now I like math less

 

I can't really tell from Weisstein's page exactly why this happens, but I'm wondering if it has something to do with people's propensity to round things off to the most significant digit?

 

I believe it has nothing to do with rounding. Evidently there is a propensity for the logarithms of the numbers in a large data set to be distributed uniformly, from which you get the percentages I listed. I realize that simply noting this prepensity does nothing to explain it, but it narrows the focus a bit.

 

You might try asking the guy cited here.

 

So I guess this means that you really don't need to learn math. Just answer with numbers containing an average of three "1"s, two "2"s, a "3" and a "4" ! You don't ever have to bother with that pesky "9" digit.

 

Hey time is running out to for someone to claim a VA lottery prize!

http://www.wwbt.com/news/MGBDN3ZTRDD.html


11.7 Million (That's two 1's and a pesky 7)

the lotto south folks are going to throw in an addition "1" Million.

The winning Number is

01-02-24-32-37-and-41. two 1's, three 2's, two 3's, two 4's and a 7

He has 180 days to collect, there's another "1"!

And it needs to be claimed by 3/31 another 1 !

All reported on the Ch 12 news site. "1"s are everywhere.

So tea final total is
eight "1"s 40%
three "2"s 15%
four "3"s 20%
two "4"s 10%
two "7"s 10%
and an "8" 0.5%

That's a lot of ones! I'll be he lives at 11213 1st street!

Oh wait, look at all those "1"s in the percentages

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've got to get back to work and get a life!

 

"Save a buck or two, Oh look there's a 1...and 2... grrrrr..."