For Tuesday, 20 October
- Read " Following Benford's Law, or Looking out for No. 1" (by Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times, 4 August 1998, p. F4).
- Find a set of numbers from some Middlebury publication (your choice, but it will need to be fairly large to do the exercise). Make a dotplot or histogram of the leading digits. Do the data appear to follow Benford's Law?
Think about the following questions for discussion in class:
- (1) Do you understand the distinction made in the article between balls in the lottery actually being numbers vs. merely being labeled with numbers?
- (2) The discoverers of Benford's law said that it should be satisfied for "natural" data. What do you think was meant by that?
- (3) See if the law holds for the leading digits of the first 20 powers of 2; that is for the numbers 1,2,4,8,16,...