Frank Benford: 2 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

2 ideas and puzzles from Frank Benford, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

Guess which digit starts most of the world's numbers
Gather a huge pile of real-world numbers — river lengths, stock prices, populations, electricity bills, anything — and look only at the very first digit of each one. You'd expect t…
— Frank Benford, The Law of Anomalous Numbers
In almost any large set of real numbers, more of them start with 1 than any other digit
Look at river lengths, stock prices or street addresses: about 30% begin with the digit 1, shrinking all the way down to under 5% for 9. Frank Benford documented the pattern across…
— Frank Benford, The Law of Anomalous Numbers

Five ideas worth knowing, every week