Number 1 and Benford's Law - Numberphile
Why number 1 is the "leading digit" more often than you may expect? More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ See us test the law using Brady's YouTube viewing figures at: http://yout...
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STEVE MOULD: This is Benford's Law. And it's about numbers, but it's about the leading digit. For example, you could look at the populations of all the countries in the world and look at the leading digits of all those. So for example, if it was 1,269, then the leading digit in that case is the one. Benford's Law works on a distribution of numbers if that distribution spans quite a few orders of magnitude. And the brilliant thing about populations of countries is that it actually goes from tens up to billions. If you were to think about that, OK, what are the distribution of leading digits. So some of the populations will start with the one, some will start with two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine. And so there ...
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STEVE MOULD: This is Benford's Law. And it's about numbers, but it's about the leading digit. For example, you could look at the populations of all the countries in the world and look at the leading digits of all those. So for example, if it was 1,269, then the leading digit in that case is the one. Benford's Law works on a distribution of numbers if that distribution spans quite a few orders of magnitude. And the brilliant thing about populations of countries is that it actually goes from tens up to billions. If you were to think about that, OK, what are the distribution of leading digits. So some of the populations will start with the one, some will start with two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine. And so there ...
