資料來源:2019/01/11 Robert Matthews

It’s lurking in everything from company accounts and stock market data to tax returns and even the prices paid for racehorses.

It is the bizarre law governing the frequency of seemingly random numbers - which is now seen as a crucial weapon in the global fight against fraud.

It’s called Benford’s Law, and it predicts that in a large collection of data, around 30 per cent of the numbers will start with the digit "1".

First discovered over 130 years ago, its existence has long provoked controversy.

Earlier this month researchers showed how Benford’s Law could help combat criminal activity in the USD 10 trillion-plus international trade business.

Such hard-nosed applications belie the law’s humdrum origins. During the 1880s, an American astronomer noted that books of logarithms, then widely used to carry out complex calculations, seemed grubbier near the beginning. For some unknown reason, it seemed that calculations more often involved numbers starting with the digit “1” than any other.

There even seemed to be a rule of thumb governing the phenomenon, according to which 30 per cent of calculations involved numbers begin with the digit "1", around 18 per cent start with a "2", 13 per cent with “3”, down to just 5 per cent with the digit "9".

For decades, this bizarre discovery was dismissed as just a curiosity. Then in 1938 a physicist at the US company General Electric named Frank Benford found the same proportions of digits among tens of thousands of numbers extracted from sources as diverse as articles in Reader’s Digest to geographical data...詳全文

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