Benford’s Law
Dave Groce
Benford’s Law is an non-intuitive, non-linear, initial digit (most significant) frequency law for series of natural, social or mathematically-manipulated numbers. Some examples include atomic weights, populations of counties or in-come tax returns. The law was initially discovered by Simon Newcomb in 1881 but was ignored. It was rediscovered by Frank Benford in 1938. It has a number of unique properties such as scale and base invariance. The law now has a va-riety of applications, especially in fraud-detection in accounting and auditing.
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