Tuesday, April 21, 2015

R is for . . .

I'm posting Mad-Cool-Math Nuggets for the A to Z Challenge.















Image courtesy: Wikicommons

R is for random data. I got the idea for this blog from 5 Seriously Mind-Boggling Math Facts on the LiveScience website.

Consider all the street addresses in the United States, or the lengths of all the rivers in the world, or stock prices. What will the first digit of these numbers be? A random collection of the nine nonzero digits? Surprisingly not!

For many large collections of numbers, you will see that more of them start with the digit 1 than any other digit--about 30%. The next largest group will start with the digit 2, and so it goes down to 5% of the numbers starting with the digit 9. See the graph above.

You can read more about Benford's Law here. Large sets of numbers that do not follow Benford's law do exist, such as telephone numbers.

Want to try a little test of Benford's law? If you aren't worried about security, put the number of your street address in the comments below. Any street address number will do: home, work, school, favorite bar. I'll start: 249.


36 comments:

  1. Bar graphs were my favorite to do. Line graphs? Not so much.

    I never heard of Benford's law, but that's not surprising.

    Okay...I'll play...306.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is so interesting. I'm not much of a math geek, but I do like to random facts!

    ReplyDelete
  3. How peculiar! I live at number 7. And before I moved here I lived another number 7, and before that at number 6. That makes 20 or have I lost the plot?!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I can see how that works out, after all 1 million starts with 1 and you might not get much higher than that, but there'll be a lot of other numbers starting with 9,8,7 below that. I'm probably way off track.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh my, that is pretty easy to prove out, and my address adds to that data set: 1809.

    Although, I'm not sure we can actually call addresses a truly random number set because most numeration conventions count up from a specific location, and many streets are short enough to make not make it very far down the numbers.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Mine is the wrecking ball.... starts with 8!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm remembering something Adam said on the show Numbers........which I loved! Wish they hadn't taken it off, thought it was a good way to get people interested in math, numbers, realizing how things are tied together. Somehow, I think he said there was no such thing as random......that, even i random there were patterns?

    ReplyDelete
  8. uniform and has caused her exquisite body, I pity the perspective of Achat de casquettes New Era cheap adidas zx 750 whether to use it, otherwise it will give your . cheap adidas zx 750 I really do not know what she's hiding something casquette baseball pas cher beneath the uniform, cheap adidas zx 750 This reporter is really casquette new era pas cher beautiful, but could not conceal a

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thank you for sharing this blog, It is an amazing blog, I am really impressed by your blog, It’s really useful norton.com/setup

    ReplyDelete
  10. Great information, I was searching for this kind of information, thank you very much for sharing with us. i also have some links to share mcafee.com/activate

    www.mcafee.com/activate

    ReplyDelete
  11. 바카라사이트 Hello Dear, are you actually visiting this web page on a regular basis, if so afterward
    you will absolutely obtain pleasant knowledge.

    ReplyDelete
  12. 토토사이트 It’s really a great and useful piece of information. I am happy that you just
    shared this useful information with us. Please stay us informed like this.
    Thank you for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Incredible post I should state and much obliged for the data. Instruction is unquestionably a sticky subject. Be that as it may, is still among the main themes of our opportunity. I value your post and anticipate more. 메이저저사이트

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thank you ever so for you blog article. Much obliged. Really informative article. Really looking forward to read more. Cool. 야한동영상

    Please visit once. I leave my blog address below
    야설
    야한동영상

    ReplyDelete
  15. Nice Many Thanks for sharing this awesome content you provide to all your reader's. Really appreciate it. 일본야동

    Please visit once. I leave my blog address below
    한국야동
    일본야동

    ReplyDelete
  16. My programmer is trying to convince me to move to .net from 토토사이트. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he's tryiong none the less.

    ReplyDelete
  17. This is the perfect post.안전놀이터 It helped me a lot. If you have time, I hope you come to my site and share your opinions. Have a nice day.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Your post is very helpful and information is reliable. I am satisfied with your post. Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful post. If you have any assignment requirement then you are at the right place. 메이저사이트

    ReplyDelete

I will do everything in my power to visit commenter's blogs unless I've been abducted by aliens or my children get sick. (If my children get abducted by aliens, I will be very busy, of course, catching up on my sleep.)