---
tag: HDNCRQPKGG
kind: statement
role: proposition
name: Phenomenological laws
sources:
  - wikipedia: en:77662984@r1362840840
    locator: Law (mathematics), section Notable examples > Phenomenological laws
    note: adopted
    mention: wikipedia://en/77662984#PZSK
    sections: [Statement]
inventory: [7F4FP1TZTN]
---

## Statement

Benford's law is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small. In sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. Uniformly distributed digits would each occur about 11.1% of the time.

Strong law of small numbers, in a humorous way, states any given small number appears in far more contexts than may seem reasonable, leading to many apparently surprising coincidences in mathematics, simply because small numbers appear so often and yet are so few.