Benford's Law: The Strange Pattern That Catches Financial Fraudsters

An interactive explorer for Benford's Law across real datasets

I explore Benford's Law, a counterintuitive rule where the digit 1 appears as a leading number 30% of the time in real-world data. From Simon Newcomb's worn logarithm tables to Frank Benford's systematic study, this law spans everything from river lengths to the Fibonacci sequence. I explain the math behind scale invariance and demonstrate how forensic accountants use these patterns to detect financial fraud by spotting human-invented numbers.

"The instinctive answer is one in nine — roughly 11%. It is wrong. Spectacularly, verifiably, universally wrong."