DAY ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY EIGHT

Last night one of my friends brought up Benford's law, which is really interesting. It's about the statistical distribution of numbers, with one being much more likely than any other number to begin a number, and nature having a deep and ingrained preference for things beginning with 1, then 2, then 3, and so on. I like this part of it:

In 1972, Hal Varian suggested that the law could be used to detect possible fraud in lists of socio-economic data submitted in support of public planning decisions. Based on the plausible assumption that people who make up figures tend to distribute their digits fairly uniformly, a simple comparison of first-digit frequency distribution from the data with the expected distribution according to Benford's law ought to show up any anomalous results.[6] Following this idea, Mark Nigrini showed that Benford's law could be used in forensic accounting and auditing as an indicator of accounting and expenses fraud. In the United States, evidence based on Benford's law is legally admissible in criminal cases at the federal, state, and local levels.

Then there's the Radiolab broadcast, where I first heard about it. The Radiolab broadcast also is about Erdos, who is a famous mathematician from whom all other mathematicians (and others) trace their six-degrees of Erdos, kinda like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. But, if you wanna get really, really real, try the Erdos-Bacon number.