Last update: Mon Mar 13 02:01:15 MDT 2017
@Article{Varian:1972:LEB,
author = "Hal R. Varian",
title = "Letter to the {Editor}: {Benford's Law}",
journal = j-AMER-STAT,
volume = "26",
number = "3",
pages = "65--66",
month = jun,
year = "1972",
CODEN = "ASTAAJ",
ISSN = "0003-1305 (print), 1537-2731 (electronic)",
ISSN-L = "0003-1305",
bibdate = "Fri Mar 30 11:34:37 2007",
bibsource = "http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/amstat1970.bib",
URL = "http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1305%28197206%2926%3A3%3C62%3ALTTE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q",
abstract = "Around 1938 the physicist Frank Benford observed a
rather strange fact: tables of logarithms in libraries
tend to be dirtier at the beginning than at the end.
This indicated to Benford that people had more occasion
to calculate with numbers beginning with 1 or 2 than
with 8 or 9.\par
Benford also found that the frequency of the digit p
being the first digit of a decimal number was very
closely approximated by $ \log (p + 1) - \log p $
[i.e., $ \log (1 + 1 / p) $ ]. This has become known as
Benford's law.",
acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
fjournal = "The American Statistician",
journal-URL = "http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utas20",
keywords = "Benford's Law; Law of Anomalous Numbers; Zipf's Law",
}