Benford’s law is one of those weird natural mathematical occurrences that seems too counter-intuitive to be true. Basically, it breaks down like this: Take almost any naturally occurring number set. It could be anything like U.S. Census information, lengths of rivers, stock market prices, heights of buildings, heights of mountains, company payrolls, etc. Now, putting all that numerical information in a list, what do you think the most common leading digit would be? What do you think the chances are that the leading digit is 1? I would think that, since there are 9 possible digits, the chances would be 1 in 9. But! then I’d be wrong. The chances that 1 is the leading digit is actually 30.1%. In fact, the most common leading digit is 1, followed by 2, then 3, and so on. That’s amazing!