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The Conversation USA

How a simple observation from the 1800s about patterns in big data sets can fight fraud

  • Written by The Conversation Contributor
imageWhy are some pages of a book of numbers tables more dog-eared than others?Book image via www.shutterstock.com.

Benford’s law was first mentioned by the American scientist Simon Newcomb in the 1880s, when he noticed that in books of tables of logarithms, the pages of numbers whose leading digit was 1 were more worn than the pages of numbers...

Read more: How a simple observation from the 1800s about patterns in big data sets can fight fraud

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