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Attention mathletes

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This is fascinating.

[Updated after Eric's comment to add something dorky:

I pulled out all of the numbers he used in his first blog post (excluding the code) and calculated the ratios of leading digits.

My research found that 1 was the leading digit of the numbers mentioned 44% of the time, followed by 2 at 13% and 0 at 9%.

;-]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2006
    A couple articles I wrote on the subject that you might also find interesting:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2005/01/12/351693.aspx

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2005/01/13/352284.aspx

    Eric
  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2006
    I remember when this came out. It was surprising, but quite understandable in reading through the article. My memory of it was the focus on being able to algorithmically find tax cheats. I didn't realize it came about by noticing a mundane thing like worn pages in a logarithm table.
  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2006
    Eric - why am I not surprised? :-) I fwded those to one of our PUMs who's a huge math geek too.

    Jack - that's the part that I find the most fascinating about this, that such a discovery came about because of such a 'human element'.