Population 57(4/5), 753-761 (translated from French by SR Hayford).
ISSN/ISBN: 1634-2941 DOI: 10.3917/popu.204.0761
Abstract: The “first significant digit” of a number is its leftmost non-zero digit. For example, the first significant digit of the number 325 is 3 and the first significant digit of 0.8732 is 8. It might be expected that the first significant digits of any given series of numbers, or of a set of numbers measuring any given phenomenon, are randomly distributed. Nothing of the sort: in most series found in the real world, figure 1 appears more often than figure 2, which in turn appears more often than figure 3, and so on. The purpose of this note is to illustrate this rule, known as Benford’s law, using data for the populations of all world countries, and to show its underlying logic, which in this particular case, relies on the pattern of population growth.
Bibtex:
@article{,
title={Do populations conform to the law of anomalous numbers?},
author={Sandron, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric},
journal={Population},
volume={57},
number={4},
pages={753--761},
year={2002},
publisher={INED},
ISSN={1634-2941},
DOI={10.3917/popu.204.0761},
URL={http://www.cairn-int.info/journal-population-2002-4-page-753.htm},
}
Reference Type: Journal Article
Subject Area(s): General Interest