So you try to purchase something at the local store and they tell you your credit card’s not working. You phone company and it turns out your card’s been making fraud purchases and that’s why VISA/Mastercard/American Express/Whatever-your-company blocked it!
But did you ever stop to wonder how they knew about this? It’s Benford’s Law (amongst other things).
Numbers in the natural world have a very special distribution. In your math class in high school, you probably heard about the normal distribution. Well the Bendford’s law follow a completely different distribution. It goes like this (off Wikipedia) :
Leading Digit Probability
1 30.1%
2 17.6%
3 12.5%
4 9.7%
5 7.9%
6 6.7%
7 5.8%
8 5.1%
9 4.6%
Now let’s see in more details how this works. The following video is taken from the website called Kirix.
Now you know!
