Is this a big number?


Free-form entry eg: '125000km', '1.5 million inches', '$67bn', '45000000 AUD', 100years', '123456789', '1 trillion', '1.5e6', '25 million kg'

For the Love of Numbers

Number-led writings for the truly geeky

Benford’s Brain-boggling Law

Take a set of numbers collected from “the wild”.  You might take company profits, city population statistics, street numbers or odometer readings.  How many of the numbers in your set start with “1″? how many with “2″? with “3″?, “4″? …

Amazing as it sounds, these leading digits are NOT evenly distributed but follow a pattern (30% “1″s, down to less than 5% “9″s). This pattern is so reliable, it’s been used in fraud detection, to trap companies cooking their books: the invented numbers did not follow Benford’s Law.

Follow the link for a fascinating explanation of why this is so.

http://datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html

Getting to Grips with Big

Stop worrying and learn to love big numbers

Gun Deaths In America

Powerful infographic from the FiveThirtyEight.com website (to whom all respect for numbers-led analysis and comment). Gives the question some context and perspective. And #ContextMatters. (Red dots are suicides, blue are homicides, yellow are accidents)

Overall, 33,000 people a year die from shootings in the USA. That IS a big number.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

/./itabn/compare?number=33000

Numbers In The News

Notable numbers we have spotted recently

Is That a Big Number? (the book)

Is That a Big Number is now a book, published by Oxford University Press. (Google ISBN  0198821220 to find many online booksellers). Although there is serious purpose behind the book - to explore how we think about numbers and how we can understand big numbers - it’s written in a light and engaging style.

Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with numeracy. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you’re struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.

/./article/book-synopsis/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/That-Big-Number-Andrew-Elliott/dp/0198821220/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Is That A Big Number? - The Book

Yes, there's now an engaging, informative book based on these numbers. Oxford University Press: July 2018.

Click here to learn more about it.

Click here for Podcast: Andrew Elliott interviewed for New Books Network.

http://itabn.tumblr.com/post/138631317782/this-website