What do absent aliens, dodgy dictators and financial fraudsters have in common? Benford's law can help hunt them down. Benf ord's law states that lists of numbers related to some natural or human activities will contain a particular distribution of digits. If you take a list of the areas of river basins, say, or the figures in a firm's accounts, there will always be more numbers that start with 1 than any other. Numbers starting with 2 are the next most common, then 3 and so on. A number will start with a 9 only 4.6 per cent of the time.
展开▼
