If you’ve not heard about Benford’s Law before, you’re in for a real treat with this post.

    Before we get into the theory, however, indulge with me in a little thought experiment. (Gedanken)

    Imagine I have a database of randomly occurring measurements (for instance I just happen to have a database of the altitude of the top 122,000 populated towns in the World).

    If I were to plot a frequency histogram of this data based on the leftmost digit of each altitude (in feet), what do you think the shape of the graph would be?




posted 4411 days ago