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Mir, TA (2011)

Law of the leading digits and the ideological struggle for numbers

physics arXiv:1104.3948.

ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.09.001



Abstract: Benford's law states that occurence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but follows a logrithimic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger ones. We investigate the country-wise adherent distribution of seven major world religions i.e. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Bhah'ism to see if the proportion of the leading digits conform to the Benford's law. We found that the adherent data on all the religions, except Christianity, excellently conform to the Benford's law. Further, unlike data on Christainity, the significant digit distribution of the three major Christian denominations Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy obey the law. The study indicates that Benford's law can be used as a statistical tool to test the integrity of the available world religion adherent data which is bound to be suspicious due to infancy of religious demography research.


Bibtex:
@misc{, title={Law of the leading digits and the ideological struggle for numbers}, author={Mir, Tariq Ahmad}, howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.3948}, year={2011}, DOI={10.1016/j.physa.2011.09.001}, }


Reference Type: E-Print

Subject Area(s): General Interest, Physics