Re: [asa] Number systems in the OT --Benford's Law

Iain Strachan wrote:
> Hi, Phil,
>
>
> There is a simple but initially puzzling law (Benford's law) that
> states that the numeral 1 occurs more frequently as the most
> significant digit than all the others in naturally occurring numbers.
> Apparently it can be used to detect fraudulent bank accounts where the
> numbers were generated by a random number generator.
>
> Read it up at http://math.suite101.com/article.cfm/benfords_law
>
> Iain
>
Thanks for bringing that up, Iain --I had never heard of it. But in a
way it makes intuitive sense. At least here would be my stab at
explaining it.

Numbers of countable things that we find at hand in house & society
always start at the bottom, of course. I.e. we start counting with 1.
And since many significant things are smaller numbers we even have words
for those significant quantities like "single" or "couple" or
"triplet". Whereas while "Octet" is a word, it doesn't get as much
usage. There aren't as many significant octets in our collective lives
as pairs, for example. Or our bank accounts are more likely to have
$1xx than $9xx or $1,xxx than $9,xxx in them (unfortunately). And this
seems to be born out (courtesy of your link above) by the further fact
that the probability distribution continues in an unbroken decreasing
succession from one all the way to nine.

But I suppose a sociologist might point out that such "data" is skewed
by what we choose to find significant. If we were more fascinated by
how many atoms are in the moon, or how many fish were in the sea and
counted those things instead of the $ in our bank accounts & other more
obvious things near at hand, then do you suppose the distribution would
flatten out?

--Merv

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Received on Fri Aug 22 07:19:39 2008