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Scientific American
11 months agoWhat Is Benford’s Law? Why This Unexpected Pattern of Numbers Is Everywhere
Open your favorite social media platform and note how many friends or followers you have.Specifically, note the first digit of this number.For example, if you have 400 friends, the leading digit is 4, and if you have 79, it's 7. Let's say we asked many people to do this.We might expect responses across the board, as common intuition suggests that friend counts should be somewhat random and therefore their leading digits should be too, treating 1 through 9 equally.