Not to be confused with the unrelated adage Benford's law of controversy.

The distribution of first digits,

according to Benford's law. Each bar
represents a digit, and the height of
the bar is the percentage of numbers
that start with that digit.

Frequency of first significant digit of

physical constants plotted against
Benford's law

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution
of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. The law states that in many naturally
occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small.[1] For
example, in sets which obey the law, the number 1 appears as the most significant digit about
30% of the time, while 9 appears as the most significant digit less than 5% of the time. By
contrast, if the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the
time.[2] Benford's law also makes (different) predictions about the distribution of second digits,
third digits, digit combinations, and so on.

It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills,
street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers,
physical and mathematical constants,[3] and processes described by power laws (which are
very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across
multiple orders of magnitude.

The graph here shows Benford's law for base 10. There is a generalization of the law to
numbers expressed in other bases (for example, base 16), and also a generalization from
leading 1 digit to leading n digits.
It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938,[4] although it had been
previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.[5]

Benford's law is a special case of Zipf's law.[6]

Mathematical statement

A logarithmic scale bar. Picking a random x position

uniformly
on this number line, roughly 30% of the time the first digit
of the number will be 1.

A set of numbers is said to satisfy Benford's law if the leading digit d (d ∈ {1, ..., 9}) occurs with
probability

Numerically, the leading digits have the following distribution in Benford's law, where d is the
leading digit and P (d ) the probability:

d P (d ) Relative size of P (d )

1 30.1%  

2 17.6%  

3 12.5%  

4 9.7%  

5 7.9%  

6 6.7%  

7 5.8%  

8 5.1%  

9 4.6%  

The quantity P(d ) is proportional to the space between d and d + 1 on a logarithmic scale.
Therefore, this is the distribution expected if the mantissae of the logarithms of the numbers (but
not the numbers themselves) are uniformly and randomly distributed.

For example, a number x, constrained to lie between 1 and 10, starts with the digit 1 if 1 ≤ x < 2,
and starts with the digit 9 if 9 ≤ x < 10. Therefore, x starts with the digit 1 if log 1 ≤ log  x < log 2,
or starts with 9 if log 9 ≤ log x < log 10. The interval [log 1, log 2] is much wider than the interval
[log 9, log 10] (0.30 and 0.05 respectively); therefore if logx is uniformly and randomly
distributed, it is much more likely to fall into the wider interval than the narrower interval, i.e.
more likely to start with 1 than with 9. The probabilities are proportional to the interval widths,
and this gives the equation above. (The above discussion assumed x is between 1 and 10, but
the result is the same no matter how many digits x has before the decimal point.)

Benford's law in other bases

Graphs of P  ( d  ) for initial digit d

[7]
in various bases.
The dotted line shows P  ( d
 ) were the distribution uniform. In
the SVG image
, hover over a graph to show the
value for each point.

An extension of Benford's law predicts the distribution of first digits in other bases besides
decimal; in fact, any base b ≥ 1. The general form is:

For b = 2 (the binary number system), Benford's law is true but trivial: All binary numbers (except
for 0) start with the digit 1. (On the other hand, the generalization of Benford's law to second and
later digits is not trivial, even for binary numbers.)

Example

Distribution of first digits (in %, red

 bars) in the
population of the 237 countries
of the world as of July 2010. Black
dots indicate the distribution
predicted by Benford's law.

Examining a list of the heights of the 60 tallest structures in the world by category shows that 1
is by far the most common leading digit, irrespective of the unit of measurement (cf. "scale
invariance", below):

meters feet In Benford's

Leading digit
Count  % Count  % law

1 26 43.3% 18 30.0% 30.1%

2 7 11.7% 8 13.3% 17.6%

3 9 15.0% 8 13.3% 12.5%

4 6 10.0% 6 10.0% 9.7%

5 4 6.7% 10 16.7% 7.9%

6 1 1.7% 5 8.3% 6.7%

7 2 3.3% 2 3.3% 5.8%

8 5 8.3% 1 1.7% 5.1%

9 0 0.0% 2 3.3% 4.6%

Another example is the leading digit of 2n:

1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 3, 6, 1, 2, 5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 3, 6, 1... (sequence A008952 in the OEIS)

History

The discovery of Benford's law goes back to 1881, when the American astronomer Simon
Newcomb noticed that in logarithm tables the earlier pages (that started with 1) were much
more worn than the other pages.[5] Newcomb's published result is the first known instance of
this observation and includes a distribution on the second digit, as well. Newcomb proposed a
law that the probability of a single number N being the first digit of a number was equal to
log(N + 1) − log(N).

The phenomenon was again noted in 1938 by the physicist Frank Benford,[4] who tested it on
data from 20 different domains and was credited for it. His data set included the surface areas
of 335 rivers, the sizes of 3259 US populations, 104 physical constants, 1800 molecular weights,
5000 entries from a mathematical handbook, 308 numbers contained in an issue of Reader's
Digest, the street addresses of the first 342 persons listed in American Men of Science and 418
death rates. The total number of observations used in the paper was 20,229. This discovery was
later named after Benford (making it an example of Stigler's Law).

In 1995, Ted Hill proved the result about mixed distributions mentioned below.[8]

Explanations

Arno Berger and Ted Hill have stated that, "The widely known phenomenon called Benford’s law
continues to defy attempts at an easy derivation".[1]

However, limited explanations of Benford's law have been offered, including the following.

Overview

Benford's law states that the fractional part of the logarithm of the data is uniformly distributed
between 0 and 1. It tends to apply most accurately to data that are distributed uniformly across
many orders of magnitude. As a rule, the more orders of magnitude that the data evenly covers,
the more accurately Benford's law applies.

For instance, one can expect that Benford's law would apply to a list of numbers representing
the populations of UK villages, or representing the values of small insurance claims. But if a
"village" is defined as a settlement with population between 300 and 999, or a "small insurance
claim" is defined as a claim between $50 and $99, then Benford's law will not apply.[9][10]

Consider the probability distributions shown below, referenced to a log scale.[11] In each case,
the total area in red is the relative probability that the first digit is 1, and the total area in blue is
the relative probability that the first digit is 8.

A broad probability distribution of the log of a

variable, shown on a log scale.
[11]

A narrow probability distribution of the log of a

variable, shown on a log scale
[11]
For the left distribution, the size of the areas of red and blue are approximately proportional to
the widths of each red and blue bar. Therefore, the numbers drawn from this distribution will
approximately follow Benford's law. On the other hand, for the right distribution, the ratio of the
areas of red and blue is very different from the ratio of the widths of each red and blue bar.
Rather, the relative areas of red and blue are determined more by the height of the bars than the
widths. Accordingly, the first digits in this distribution do not satisfy Benford's law at all.[10]

Thus, real-world distributions that span several orders of magnitude rather uniformly (e.g.
populations of villages / towns / cities, stock-market prices), are likely to satisfy Benford's law to
a very high accuracy. On the other hand, a distribution that is mostly or entirely within one order
of magnitude (e.g. heights of human adults, or IQ scores) is unlikely to satisfy Benford's law
very accurately, or at all.[9][10] However, it is not a sharp line: As the distribution gets narrower,
the discrepancies from Benford's law typically increase gradually.

In terms of conventional probability density (referenced to a linear scale rather than log scale,
i.e. P(x)dx rather than P(log x) d(log x)), the equivalent criterion is that Benford's law will be very
accurately satisfied when P(x) is approximately proportional to 1/x over several orders-of-
magnitude variation in x.[11]

This discussion is not a full explanation of Benford's law, because we have not explained why
we so often come across data-sets that, when plotted as a probability distribution of the
logarithm of the variable, are relatively uniform over several orders of magnitude.[12] The
following sections give examples of how this might happen.

Outcomes of exponential growth processes

An example of where Benford's law would occur is in measuring the population of bacteria over
a period. If 1000 cells of bacteria are introduced into a dish full of food, the number of bacteria
grows exponentially, doubling each day. Every few hours for 30 days, the number of bacteria
that are in the dish are recorded. By the end of 30 days, there will be a trillion bacteria. This list
of numbers will follow Benford's law quite accurately.

As the number of bacteria is growing exponentially, doubling each day, on the first day, the
number of bacteria is increasing from 1000 towards 2000: The first digit is 1 the whole day. On
the second day, there are 2000 bacteria increasing towards 4000: The first digit is 2 for fourteen
hours and 3 for six hours. On the third day, there are 4000 bacteria increasing towards 8000:
The first digit will pass through 4, 5, 6, and 7, spending less and less time in each digit. The next
day, there are 8000 bacteria increasing towards 16,000. The leading digit will pass rapidly
through 8 and 9 in a few hours, but then once there are 10,000 bacteria, the first digit will be 1
for a whole 24 hours, until the number of bacteria gets to 20,000. Therefore, the first digit is 1
with the highest probability, and 9 with the lowest.
An exponentially growing quantity is moving rightward on a log-scale at a constant rate.
Measuring the number of bacteria at a random time in the 30-day window, gives a random point
on the log-scale, uniformly distributed in that corresponding window (about 6 orders of
magnitude). As explained in the previous section, this kind of probability distribution satisfies
Benford's law with high accuracy.

Multiplicative fluctuations

Many real-world examples of Benford's law arise from multiplicative fluctuations.[13] For
example, if a stock price starts at $100, and then each day it gets multiplied by a randomly
chosen factor between 0.99 and 1.01, then over an extended period the probability distribution
of its price satisfies Benford's law with higher and higher accuracy.

The reason is that the logarithm of the stock price is undergoing a random walk, so over time its
probability distribution will get more and more broad and uniform (see above).[13] (More
technically, the central limit theorem says that multiplying more and more random variables will
create a log-normal distribution with larger and larger variance, so eventually it covers many
orders of magnitude almost uniformly.)

Unlike multiplicative fluctuations, additive fluctuations do not lead to Benford's law: They lead
instead to normal probability distributions (again by the central limit theorem), which do not
satisfy Benford's law. For example, the "number of heartbeats that I experience on a given day"
can be written as the sum of many random variables (e.g. the sum of heartbeats per minute over
all the minutes of the day), so this quantity is unlikely to follow Benford's law. By contrast, that
hypothetical stock price described above can be written as the product of many random
variables (i.e. the price change factor for each day), so is likely to follow Benford's law quite well.

Scale invariance

If there is a list of lengths, the distribution of first digits of numbers in the list may be generally
similar regardless of whether all the lengths are expressed in metres, or yards, or feet, or inches,
etc.

This is not always the case. For example, the height of adult humans almost always starts with a
1 or 2 when measured in meters, and almost always starts with 4, 5, 6, or 7 when measured in
feet.

But consider a list of lengths that is spread evenly over many orders of magnitude. For example,
a list of 1000 lengths mentioned in scientific papers will include the measurements of
molecules, bacteria, plants, and galaxies. If one writes all those lengths in meters, or writes them
all in feet, it is reasonable to expect that the distribution of first digits should be the same on the
two lists.
In these situations, where the distribution of first digits of a data set is scale invariant (or
independent of the units that the data are expressed in), the distribution of first digits is always
given by Benford's Law.[14][15] To be sure of approximate agreement with Benford's Law, the
data has to be approximately invariant when scaled up by any factor up to 10. A lognormally
distributed data set with wide dispersion has this approximate property.

For example, the first (non-zero) digit on this list of lengths should have the same distribution
whether the unit of measurement is feet or yards. But there are three feet in a yard, so the
probability that the first digit of a length in yards is 1 must be the same as the probability that
the first digit of a length in feet is 3, 4, or 5. Applying this to all possible measurement scales
gives the logarithmic distribution of Benford's law.

Multiple probability distributions

For numbers drawn from certain distributions (IQ scores, human heights) the Law fails to hold
because these variates obey a normal distribution which is known not to satisfy Benford's
law,[16] since normal distributions can't span several orders of magnitude and the mantissae of
their logarithms will not be (even approximately) uniformly distributed.

However, if one "mixes" numbers from those distributions, for example by taking numbers from
newspaper articles, Benford's law reappears. This can also be proven mathematically: if one
repeatedly "randomly" chooses a probability distribution (from an uncorrelated set) and then
randomly chooses a number according to that distribution, the resulting list of numbers will
obey Benford's Law.[8][17] A similar probabilistic explanation for the appearance of Benford's
Law in everyday-life numbers has been advanced by showing that it arises naturally when one
considers mixtures of uniform distributions.[18]

Applications

Accounting fraud detection

In 1972, Hal Varian suggested that the law could be used to detect possible fraud in lists of
socio-economic data submitted in support of public planning decisions. Based on the plausible
assumption that people who make up figures tend to distribute their digits fairly uniformly, a
simple comparison of first-digit frequency distribution from the data with the expected
distribution according to Benford's Law ought to show up any anomalous results.[19] Following
this idea, Mark Nigrini showed that Benford's Law could be used in forensic accounting and
auditing as an indicator of accounting and expenses fraud.[20] In practice, applications of
Benford's Law for fraud detection routinely use more than the first digit.[20]

Legal status
Legal status

In the United States, evidence based on Benford's law has been admitted in criminal cases at
the federal, state, and local levels.[21]

Election data

Benford's Law has been invoked as evidence of fraud in the 2009 Iranian elections,[22] and also
used to analyze other election results. However, other experts consider Benford's Law
essentially useless as a statistical indicator of election fraud in general.[23][24]

Macroeconomic data

Similarly, the macroeconomic data the Greek government reported to the European Union
before entering the eurozone was shown to be probably fraudulent using Benford's law, albeit
years after the country joined.[25]

Price Digit Analysis

Benford's law as a benchmark for the investigation of price digits has been successfully
introduced into the context of pricing research. The importance of this benchmark for detecting
irregularities in prices was first demonstrated in a European wide study[26] which investigated
consumer price digits before and after the euro introduction for price adjustments. The euro
introduction in 2002, with its various exchange rates, distorted existing nominal price patterns
while at the same time retaining real prices. While the first digits of nominal prices distributed
according to Benford's Law, the study showed a clear deviation from this benchmark for the
second and third digits in nominal market prices with a clear trend towards psychological
pricing after the nominal shock of the euro introduction.

Genome data

The number of open reading frames and their relationship to genome size differs between
eukaryotes and prokaryotes with the former showing a log-linear relationship and the latter a
linear relationship. Benford's law has been used to test this observation with an excellent fit to
the data in both cases.[27]

Scientific fraud detection

A test of regression coefficients in published papers showed agreement with Benford's law.[28]
As a comparison group subjects were asked to fabricate statistical estimates. The fabricated
results failed to obey Benford's law.
Statistical tests

Although the chi squared test has been used to test for compliance with Benford's law it has low
statistical power when used with small samples.

The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and the Kuiper test are more powerful when the sample size is
small particularly when Stephens's corrective factor is used.[29] These tests may be overly
conservative when applied to discrete distribution. Values for the Benford test have been
generated by Morrow.[30] The critical values of the test statistics are shown below:

α
0.10 0.05 0.01
Test

Kuiper Test 1.191 1.321 1.579

Kolmogorov–Smirnov 1.012 1.148 1.420

Two alternative tests specific to this law have been published: first, the max (m) statistic[31] is
given by

and secondly, the distance (d) statistic[32] is given by

where FSD is the First Significant Digit and is the sample size. Morrow has determined the
critical values for both these statistics, which are shown below:[30]

α
0.10 0.05 0.01
Statistic

Leemis' m 0.851 0.967 1.212

Cho–Gaines' d 1.212 1.330 1.569

Nigrini[33] has suggested the use of a z statistic

with
 1
where |x| is the absolute value of x, n is the sample size, 2n is a continuity correction factor, pe is
the proportion expected from Benford's law and po is the observed proportion in the sample.

Morrow has also shown that for any random variable X (with a continuous pdf) divided by its
standard deviation (σ), a value A can be found such that the probability of the distribution of the
first significant digit of the random variable ( Xσ )A will differ from Benford's Law by less than ε >
0.[30] The value of A depends on the value of ε and the distribution of the random variable.

A method of accounting fraud detection based on bootstrapping and regression has been
proposed.[34]

Generalization to digits beyond the first

It is possible to extend the law to digits beyond the first.[35] In particular, the probability of
encountering a number starting with the string of digits n is given by:

(For example, the probability that a number starts with the digits 3, 1, 4 is
log10(1 + 1/314) ≈ 0.0014.) This result can be used to find the probability that a particular digit
occurs at a given position within a number. For instance, the probability that a "2" is
encountered as the second digit is[35]

And the probability that d (d = 0, 1, ..., 9) is encountered as the n-th (n > 1) digit is

The distribution of the n-th digit, as n increases, rapidly approaches a uniform distribution with
10% for each of the ten digits.[35] Four digits is often enough to assume a uniform distribution of
10% as '0' appears 10.0176% of the time in the fourth digit while '9' appears 9.9824% of the time.

Tests with common distributions

Benford's law was empirically tested against the numbers (up to the 10th digit) generated by a
number of important distributions, including the uniform distribution, the exponential
distribution, the half-normal distribution, the right-truncated normal, the normal distribution, the
chi square distribution and the log normal distribution.[16] In addition to these the ratio
distribution of two uniform distributions, the ratio distribution of two exponential distributions,
the ratio distribution of two half-normal distributions, the ratio distribution of two right-truncated
normal distributions, the ratio distribution of two chi-square distributions (the F distribution) and
the log normal distribution were tested.

The uniform distribution as might be expected does not obey Benford's law. In contrast, the ratio
distribution of two uniform distributions is well described by Benford's law. Benford's law also
describes the exponential distribution and the ratio distribution of two exponential distributions
well. Although the half-normal distribution does not obey Benford's law, the ratio distribution of
two half-normal distributions does. Neither the right-truncated normal distribution nor the ratio
distribution of two right-truncated normal distributions are well described by Benford's law. This
is not surprising as this distribution is weighted towards larger numbers. Neither the normal
distribution nor the ratio distribution of two normal distributions (the Cauchy distribution) obey
Benford's law. The fit of chi square distribution depends on the degrees of freedom (df) with
good agreement with df = 1 and decreasing agreement as the df increases. The F distribution is
fitted well for low degrees of freedom. With increasing dfs the fit decreases but much more
slowly than the chi square distribution. The fit of the log-normal distribution depends on the
mean and the variance of the distribution. The variance has a much greater effect on the fit than
does the mean. Larger values of both parameters result in better agreement with the law. The
ratio of two log normal distributions is a log normal so this distribution was not examined.

Other distributions that have been examined include the Muth distribution, Gompertz
distribution, Weibull distribution, gamma distribution, log-logistic distribution and the
exponential power distribution all of which show reasonable agreement with the law.[31][36] The
Gumbel distribution – a density increases with increasing value of the random variable – does
not show agreement with this law.[36]

Distributions known to obey Benford's law

Some well-known infinite integer sequences provably satisfy Benford's Law exactly (in the
asymptotic limit as more and more terms of the sequence are included). Among these are the
Fibonacci numbers,[37][38] the factorials,[39] the powers of 2,[40][41] and the powers of almost any
other number.[40]

Likewise, some continuous processes satisfy Benford's Law exactly (in the asymptotic limit as
the process continues through time). One is an exponential growth or decay process: If a
quantity is exponentially increasing or decreasing in time, then the percentage of time that it has
each first digit satisfies Benford's Law asymptotically (i.e. increasing accuracy as the process
continues through time).

Distributions known to not obey Benford's law

Square roots and reciprocals do not obey this law.[42] Also, Benford's law does not apply to
unary systems such as tally marks. The 1974 Vancouver, Canada telephone book violates
Benford's law because regulations require that telephone numbers have a fixed number of digits
and do not begin with 1. Benford's law is violated by the populations of all places with
population at least 2500 from five US states according to the 1960 and 1970 censuses, where
only 19% began with digit 1 but 20% began with digit 2, for the simple reason that the truncation
at 2500 introduces statistical bias.[42] The terminal digits in pathology reports violate Benford's
law due to rounding, and the fact that terminal digits are never expected to follow Benford's law
in the first place.[43]

Criteria for distributions expected and not expected to obey

Benford's Law

A number of criteria—applicable particularly to accounting data—have been suggested where

Benford's Law can be expected to apply and not to apply.[44]

Distributions that can be expected to obey Benford's Law

When the mean is greater than the median and the skew is positive

Numbers that result from mathematical combination of numbers: e.g. quantity × price

Transaction level data: e.g. disbursements, sales

Numbers produced when doing any multiplicative calculations with an Oughtred slide rule,
since the answers naturally fall into the right logarithmic distribution.

Distributions that would not be expected to obey Benford's Law

Where numbers are assigned sequentially: e.g. check numbers, invoice numbers

Where numbers are influenced by human thought: e.g. prices set by psychological thresholds
($1.99)

Accounts with a large number of firm-specific numbers: e.g. accounts set up to record $100
refunds

Accounts with a built-in minimum or maximum

Where no transaction is recorded

Moments
Moments

Moments of random variables for the digits 1 to 9 following this law have been calculated:[45]

mean 3.440

variance 6.057

skewness 0.796

kurtosis −0.548

For the first and second digit distribution these values are also known:[46]

mean 38.590

variance 621.832

skewness 0.772

kurtosis −0.547

A table of the exact probabilities for the joint occurrence of the first two digits according to
Benford's law is available,[46] as is the population correlation between the first and second
digits:[46] ρ = 0.0561.

See also

Fraud detection in predictive analytics

References

1. ^ a b Arno Berger and Theodore P Hill, Benford's Law Strikes Back: No Simple Explanation in
Sight for Mathematical Gem, 2011

2. ^ Weisstein, Eric W. "Benford's Law" . MathWorld, A Wolfram web resource. Retrieved 7 June
2015.

3. ^ Paul H. Kvam, Brani Vidakovic, Nonparametric Statistics with Applications to Science and
Engineering, p. 158

4. ^ a b Frank Benford (March 1938). "The law of anomalous numbers" . Proc. Am. Philos. Soc.
78 (4): 551–572. JSTOR 984802 . (subscription required)

5. ^ a b Simon Newcomb (1881). "Note on the frequency of use of the different digits in natural
numbers". American Journal of Mathematics. American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 4, No. 1. 4
(1/4): 39–40. doi:10.2307/2369148 . JSTOR 2369148 . (subscription required)

6. ^ Johan Gerard van der Galien (2003-11-08). "Factorial randomness: the Laws of Benford and
Zipf with respect to the first digit distribution of the factor sequence from the natural
numbers" . Retrieved 8 July 2016.

7. ^ They should strictly be bars but are shown as lines for clarity.

8. ^ a b Theodore P. Hill (1995). "A Statistical Derivation of the Significant-Digit Law" (PDF).
Statistical Science. 10: 354–363. doi:10.1214/ss/1177009869 . MR 1421567 .

9. ^ a b Steven W. Smith. "The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing,
chapter 34, Explaining Benford's Law" . Retrieved 15 December 2012. (especially section 10 ).

10. ^ a b c Fewster, R. M. (2009). "A simple explanation of Benford's Law". The American
Statistician. 63 (1): 26–32. doi:10.1198/tast.2009.0005 .

11. ^ a b c d This section discusses and plots probability distributions of the logarithms of a
variable. This is not the same as taking a regular probability distribution of a variable, and
simply plotting it on a log scale. Instead, one multiplies the distribution by a certain function.
The log scale distorts the horizontal distances, so the height has to be changed also, in order for
the area under each section of the curve to remain true to the original distribution. See, for
example, [1] . Specifically:  .

12. ^ Arno Berger and Theodore P Hill, Benford's Law Strikes Back: No Simple Explanation in
Sight for Mathematical Gem, 2011 . The authors describe this argument, but say it "still leaves
open the question of why it is reasonable to assume that the logarithm of the spread, as
opposed to the spread itself—or, say, the log log spread—should be large." Moreover, they say:
"assuming large spread on a logarithmic scale is equivalent to assuming an approximate
conformance with [Benford's law]" (italics added), something which they say lacks a "simple
explanation".

13. ^ a b L. Pietronero; E. Tosatti; V. Tosatti; A. Vespignani (2001). "Explaining the uneven

distribution of numbers in nature: the laws of Benford and Zipf". Physica A. 293: 297–304.
Bibcode:2001PhyA..293..297P . doi:10.1016/S0378-4371(00)00633-6 .

14. ^ Roger S. Pinkham, On the Distribution of First Significant Digits , Ann. Math. Statist.
Volume 32, Number 4 (1961), 1223-1230.

15. ^ MathWorld – Benford's Law

16. ^ a b Formann, A. K. (2010). Morris, Richard James, ed. "The Newcomb-Benford Law in Its
Relation to Some Common Distributions" . PLoS ONE. 5 (5): e10541.
Bibcode:2010PLoSO...510541F . doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010541 . PMC 2866333 .
PMID 20479878 .

17. ^ Theodore P. Hill (July–August 1998). "The first digit phenomenon" (PDF). American
Scientist. 86 (4): 358. Bibcode:1998AmSci..86..358H . doi:10.1511/1998.4.358 .

18. ^ Élise Janvresse and Thierry de la Rue (2004), "From Uniform Distributions to Benford's
Law", Journal of Applied Probability, 41 1203–1210 doi:10.1239/jap/1101840566
MR 2122815 preprint

19. ^ Varian, Hal (1972). "Benford's Law (Letters to the Editor)". The American Statistician. 26 (3):
65. doi:10.1080/00031305.1972.10478934 .

20. ^ a b Nigrini, Mark J. (May 1999). "I've Got Your Number:How a mathematical phenomenon
can help CPAs uncover fraud and other irregulaities" . Journal of Accountancy.

21. ^ "From Benford to Erdös" . Radio Lab. Episode 2009-10-09. 2009-09-30.

22. ^ Stephen Battersby Statistics hint at fraud in Iranian election New Scientist 24 June 2009

23. ^ Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov and Peter C. Ordeshook, (2010) The Irrelevance of
Benford’s Law for Detecting Fraud in Elections Archived 17 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine.,
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project Working Paper No. 9

24. ^ Charles R. Tolle, Joanne L. Budzien, and Randall A. LaViolette (2000) Do dynamical systems
follow Benford?s Law?, Chaos 10, 2, pp.331–336 (2000); doi:10.1063/1.166498

25. ^ Müller, Hans Christian: Greece Was Lying About Its Budget Numbers . Forbes. 12 September
2011.

26. ^ Sehity, Tarek el; Hoelzl, Erik; Kirchler, Erich (2005-12-01). "Price developments after a
nominal shock: Benford's Law and psychological pricing after the euro introduction" .
International Journal of Research in Marketing. 22 (4): 471–480.
doi:10.1016/j.ijresmar.2005.09.002 .

27. ^ Friar, JL; Goldman, T; Pérez-Mercader, J (2012). "Genome sizes and the benford
distribution". PLOS ONE. 7 (5): e36624. arXiv:1205.6512 . Bibcode:2012PLoSO...736624F .
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036624 .

28. ^ Diekmann A (2007) Not the First Digit! Using Benford's Law to detect fraudulent scientific
data. J Appl Stat 34 (3) 321–329, doi:10.1080/02664760601004940

29. ^ Stephens, M. A. (1970). "Use of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov, Cramér–Von Mises and Related
Statistics without Extensive Tables" . Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B. 32 (1):
115–122. Retrieved 2013-03-09.

30. ^ a b c Morrow, J. (2010) "Benford’s Law, Families of Distributions and a test basis" , UW-
Madison

31. ^ a b Leemis, L. M.; Schmeiser, B. W.; Evans, D. L. (2000). "Survival distributions satisfying
Benford's Law". The Amererican Statistician. 54 (4): 236–241.
doi:10.1080/00031305.2000.10474554 .

32. ^ Cho, W. K. T.; Gaines, B. J. (2007). "Breaking the (Benford) law: Statistical fraud detection in
campaign finance". The Amererican Statistician. 61 (3): 218–223.
doi:10.1198/000313007X223496 .

33. ^ Nigrini, M. (1996). "A taxpayer compliance application of Benford's Law". J Amer Tax Assoc.
18: 72–91.

34. ^ Suh, I. S.; Headrick, T. C.; Minaburo, S. (2011). "An effective and efficient analytic
technique: A bootstrap regression procedure and Benford's Law". J Forensic & Investigative
Accounting. 3 (3).

35. ^ a b c Theodore P. Hill, "The Significant-Digit Phenomenon", The American Mathematical

Monthly, Vol. 102, No. 4, (Apr., 1995), pp. 322–327. Official web link (subscription required) .
Alternate, free web link .

36. ^ a b Dümbgen, L; Leuenberger, C (2008). "Explicit bounds for the approximation error in
Benford's Law". Elect Comm in Probab. 13: 99–112. doi:10.1214/ECP.v13-1358 .

37. ^ Washington, L. C. (1981). "Benford's Law for Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers". The Fibonacci
Quarterly. 19 (2): 175–177.

38. ^ Duncan, R. L. (1967). "An Application of Uniform Distribution to the Fibonacci Numbers".
The Fibonacci Quarterly. 5: 137–140.

39. ^ Sarkar, P. B. (1973). "An Observation on the Significant Digits of Binomial Coefficients and
Factorials". Sankhya B. 35: 363–364.

40. ^ a b In general, the sequence k1, k2, k3, etc., satisfies Benford's Law exactly, under the
condition that log10 k is an irrational number. This is a straightforward consequence of the
equidistribution theorem.

41. ^ That the first 100 powers of 2 approximately satisfy Benford's Law is mentioned by Ralph
Raimi. Raimi, Ralph A. (1976). "The First Digit Problem". American Mathematical Monthly. 83 (7):
521–538. doi:10.2307/2319349 .

42. ^ a b Raimi, RA (1976). "The first digit problem". American Mathematical Monthly. 83: 521–538.
doi:10.2307/2319349 .

43. ^ Beer, TW (2009). "Terminal digit preference: beware of Benford's Law". J Clin Pathol. 62:
192. doi:10.1136/jcp.2008.061721 .

44. ^ Durtschi, C; Hillison, W; Pacini, C (2004). "The effective use of Benford's Law to assist in
detecting fraud in accounting data". J Forensic Accounting. 5: 17–34.

45. ^ Scott, P.D.; Fasli, M. (2001) "Benford’s Law: An empirical investigation and a novel
explanation" . CSM Technical Report 349, Department of Computer Science, Univ. Essex

46. ^ a b c Suh, I.S.; Headrick, T.C. (2010). "A comparative analysis of the bootstrap versus
traditional statistical procedures applied to digital analysis based on Benford's Law" (PDF).
Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting. 2 (2): 144–175.

Further reading
Further reading

Arno Berger & Theodore P. Hill (2015). An Introduction to Benford's Law. Princeton University
Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16306-2.

Alex Ely Kossovsky. Benford's Law: Theory, the General Law of Relative Quantities, and Forensic
Fraud Detection Applications , 2014, World Scientific Publishing. ISBN 978-981-4583-68-8.

"Benford's Law – from Wolfram MathWorld" . Mathworld.wolfram.com. 14 June 2012.

Retrieved 2012-06-26.

Mark J. Nigrini (2012). Benford's Law: Applications for Forensic Accounting, Auditing, and Fraud
Detection. John Wiley & Sons. p. 330. ISBN 978-1-118-15285-0.

Alessandro Gambini; et al. (2012). "Probability of digits by dividing random numbers: A ψ and
ζ functions approach". Expositiones Mathematicae. 30 (4): 223–238.
doi:10.1016/j.exmath.2012.03.001 .

Sehity; Hoelzl, Erik; Kirchler, Erich (2005). "Price developments after a nominal shock:
Benford's Law and psychological pricing after the euro introduction". International Journal of
Research in Marketing. 22 (4): 471–480. doi:10.1016/j.ijresmar.2005.09.002 .

Nicolas Gauvrit; Jean-Paul Delahaye (2011). "Scatter and regularity implies Benford's
Law...and more". Zenil: Randomness through computation: some answers, more questions. ISBN
9814327751: 58–69. arXiv:0910.1359 . Bibcode:2009arXiv0910.1359G .
doi:10.1142/9789814327756_0004 .

Bernhard Rauch; Max Göttsche; Gernot Brähler; Stefan Engel (August 2011). "Fact and Fiction
in EU-Governmental Economic Data". German Economic Review. 12 (3): 243–255.
doi:10.1111/j.1468-0475.2011.00542.x .

Wendy Cho & Brian Gaines (August 2007). "Breaking the (Benford) Law: statistical fraud
detection in campaign finance". The American Statistician. 61 (3): 218–223.
doi:10.1198/000313007X223496 .

Geiringer, Hilda; Furlan, L. V. (1948). "The Law of Harmony in Statistics: An Investigation of

the Metrical Interdependence of Social Phenomena. by L. V. Furlan". Journal of the American
Statistical Association. American Statistical Association. 43 (242): 325–328.
doi:10.2307/2280379 . JSTOR 2280379 .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Benford's law.

General audience
 Benford Online Bibliography , an online bibliographic database on Benford's Law.

Companion website for Benford's Law by Mark Nigrini Website includes 15 data sets, 10
Excel templates, photos, documents, and other miscellaneous items related to Benford's Law

Following Benford's Law, or Looking Out for No. 1 , 1998 article from The New York Times.

A further five numbers: number 1 and Benford's law , BBC radio segment by Simon Singh

From Benford to Erdös , Radio segment from the Radiolab program

Looking out for number one by Jon Walthoe, Robert Hunt and Mike Pearson, Plus Magazine,
September 1999

Video showing Benford's Law applied to Web Data (incl. Minnesota Lakes, US Census Data
and Digg Statistics)

An illustration of Benford's Law , showing first-digit distributions of various sequences

evolve over time, interactive.

Generate your own Benford numbers A script for generating random numbers compliant
with Benford's Law.

Testing Benford's Law An open source project showing Benford's Law in action against
publicly available datasets.

Testing Benford’s Law in OLAP Cubes Implementation with Microsoft Analysis Services.

Mould, Steve. "Number 1 and Benford's Law" . Numberphile. Brady Haran.

A third of property values begin with a 1 An example of Benford's Law appearing in house
price data.

Benford's Very Strange Law - Professor John D. Barrow , lecture on Benford's Law.

More mathematical
Weisstein, Eric W. "Benford's Law" . MathWorld.
Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution by Terence Tao

Country Data and Benford's Law , Benford's Law from Ratios of Random Numbers at
Wolfram Demonstrations Project.

Benford's Law Solved with Digital Signal Processing

Interactive graphic: Univariate Distribution Relationships

Last edited 7 days ago by DavidWBrooks