The First Digit 1

Abstract

Benford’s Law or The First Digit Law as it is commonly known has been a fascination to many generations. This counter-intuitive law proposes that given a sequence of numbers (usually from a data set like length of rivers, height of mountains, populations of nations or any source of data from real life), the first digit is ‘1’ roughtly 30% of the time. Many mathematical sequences, such as Fibonacci sequences also follow Benford’s Law. Benford’s Law has some interesting applications, especially in fraud detection!