Newcomb–Benford law
Ley de Newcomb-Benford
- Date
- 1881 (redescubierta en 1938) · confidence high
- Place
- Washington, D.C., United States
- Credited to
- Simon Newcomb; rediscovered and popularized by Frank Benford in 1938
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in logarithm tables the pages starting with 1 were far more worn than the rest, and deduced that in many numerical datasets the leading digit is not uniformly distributed but follows log(N+1)-log(N); physicist Frank Benford reached the same result 57 years later, testing it on over 20,000 data points from twenty different domains, and the law ended up bearing his name.
A classic case of "Stigler's law" (discoveries are rarely named after whoever made them first): Newcomb published the observation in 1881, but it became popularized and named after Benford, who independently rediscovered it in 1938.
What it led to
- Fraud-detection tool in accounting and elections via first-digit analysis
- Later study of scale-invariance laws in statistics