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Impractical Python Projects
book

Impractical Python Projects

by Lee Vaughan
November 2018
Beginner content levelBeginner
424 pages
11h 43m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Impractical Python Projects

16FINDING FRAUDS WITH BENFORD’S LAW

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Prior to the invention of electronic calculators, if you needed to take the log of a number, you looked it up in a table. Astronomer Simon Newcomb used such tables, and in 1881, he noticed that the pages in the front, used for numbers beginning with the lowest digits, were more worn than those in the back. From this mundane observation, he realized that—at least for measurements and constants in nature—the leading digits were much more likely to be small than large. He published a short article about it and moved on.

For decades, this statistical curiosity, like Tolkien’s One Ring, “passed out of all knowledge.” ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492069454