Benford's Law

Benford's Law

Following Benford's Law, or Looking Out for No. 1

By Malcolm W. Browne

(From The New York Times, Tuesday, August 4, 1998)

Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses.

"The truth is," he said in an interview, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly."

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