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Newcomb-Benford law

Science Corner: One Is The Likeliest Number

August 26, 2020 by Andy Walsh Leave a Comment

Take a list of numbers. Maybe it's your lab's itemized expenses, or the prices from a week's grocery shopping, or a list of values for physical constants. Look at just the leading digit of all those numbers. So if the number is $1.59 then you get a 1, or if it's 3.14 then you get a 3, and so forth. Now count up all the 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. What do you expect you'll find? Are you imagining a roughly equal amount of each of the nine possible digits? If so, you are in good company, because that's a common expectation. But … [Read more...] about Science Corner: One Is The Likeliest Number

Filed Under: Science and Faith Tagged With: chance vs. design, Newcomb-Benford law, probability theory, science, science corner, statistics

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