Benford's law
Benford's law proper noun: a law concerning the frequency distribution of digits in much real-world data, where the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, and the expected distribution for digits beyond the first approaches a uniform distribution.
Proper noun
Benford's law
- A law concerning the frequency distribution of digits in much real-world data, where the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, and the expected distribution for digits beyond the first approaches a uniform distribution.
- The following argument can give an intuitive feeling for Benford's law.¹¹ Consider a set of numbers x, which are randomly chosen in the interval between 1 and 10. All x between 1 and 1.999 have 1 as the first digit, all x between 2 and 2.999 have 2 as the first digit, and so on. The ratio of the...2010, Göran Grimvall, “Chapter 1: Numbers”, in Quantify! A Crash Course in Smart Thinking, Johns Hopkins University Press, →ISBN
Origin of Benford's law
Named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938.
Questions about Benford's law
- What does Benford's law mean?
- Benford's law means a law concerning the frequency distribution of digits in much real-world data, where the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, and the expected distribution for digits beyond the first approaches a uniform distribution.
- What part of speech is Benford's law?
- Benford's law is a proper noun.
Words near Benford's law in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Benford's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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