We used Benford's law to detect potential fraud. I have mentioned it here a number of times. Turns out its much more broadly observed. Which is fairly obvious, math is also observed throughout the universe. Fits my interests well. Here is a good overview. Worth understanding.
Benford’s law and distances to stars
Mysterious digit-law embedded in the universe?
By Jurjen de Jong in TowardsDataScience
One day Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was looking at the pages of logarithmic tables when he saw that the first pages were more worn out than further pages. This simple observation and the way logarithmic tables are structured, meant that numbers starting with digit 1 were more common in nature than numbers starting with digit 2 and digit 2 more common than digit 3 and so on. This strange pattern in the first-digit frequency might sound counterintuitive at first, but it turned out to be true for many numerical datasets.
To make more clear what we mean with the first digit: this means that 1, 1213123, and 0.00153 all have digit 1 as the first digit, while 312, 0.3, and π share 3 as the first digit.
Newcomb published a paper about it in 1881, but his discovery wasn’t really picked up by the scientific community. So, when Frank Benford (1883–1948) rediscovered this phenomenon in 1938, he didn’t know about Newcomb’s discovery. Benford looked at the first digits of many different datasets, such as lengths of rivers, addresses, atomic weights, random newspaper numbers, and so on. Every time, he saw a similar pattern, which supported the idea that numbers could be sorted on their first digit. This digit-law is now called Benford’s law but could also have been called Newcomb’s law. .... '
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