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The Universe Has a Favorite Number
But that’s not all Benford’s Law tells us
Did you know that the Universe has a favorite number? It’s arguably the same number favored by humans too.
Can you guess?
Okay, I’ll tell you.
One. As in, 1.
I know it seems a bit crazy, but Benford’s Law proves it again, and again. Out of all the trillions of numbers out there, more even, 1 appears about 30 percent more often than any other number.
Wait, let me back up.
What is Benford’s Law?
It all started with a guy named Simon Newcomb, a Canadian-American astronomer in the late 1880s, who happened to notice that the pages in a logarithm book (basically a calculator in book form before calculators were common) that started with the number “1” were more worn than the rest. Then he noticed the same pattern in several other books.
In 1938, an American electrical engineer named Frank Benford studied Newcomb’s seemingly silly discovery. Except, instead of keeping his explorations to the pages of books like Newcomb did, Benford tested the theory using over twenty different data sets — including the populations of over 3,000 U.S. cities, 418 death rates, and even the surface area of over 300 rivers.
