Benford's Law
Newcomb-Benford's Law · Law of Anomalous Numbers · First-Digit Law
The surprising observation that in many real-world datasets, the leading digit is far more likely to be 1 than 9. This counterintuitive pattern is so reliable it's used to detect fraud in financial data.
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Origin
First observed by astronomer Simon Newcomb in 1881, who noticed that the early pages of logarithm tables were more worn than later ones — suggesting people looked up numbers starting with 1 more often. Physicist Frank Benford independently rediscovered and validated the pattern in 1938 across 20 different datasets (river lengths, population figures, street addresses). Today it's used by auditors and forensic accountants to flag fabricated numbers.
Updated February 22, 2026