Law of small numbers
Encyclopedia
The law of small numbers may refer to
- The Law of Small Numbers (book), authored by Ladislaus BortkiewiczLadislaus BortkiewiczLadislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz , August 7, 1868 – July 15, 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish descent, who lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University and Berlin University...
- The Poisson distributionPoisson distributionIn probability theory and statistics, the Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since...
. Sometimes probability distributionProbability distributionIn probability theory, a probability mass, probability density, or probability distribution is a function that describes the probability of a random variable taking certain values....
s are called laws, and the use of that name for this distribution originated in the book The Law of Small Numbers
- The Poisson distribution
- Hasty generalizationHasty generalizationHasty generalization is a logical fallacy of faulty generalization by reaching an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence essentially making a hasty conclusion without considering all of the variables...
, a logical fallacy also known as 'the law of small numbers' - the tendency for an initial segment of data to show some bias that drops out later (one example in number theoryNumber theoryNumber theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers. Number theorists study prime numbers as well...
being Kummer's conjecture on cubic Gauss sums) - Pigeonhole principle, the occurrence of mathematical coincidences
- Random sequence should reflect the proportion, in order for a sequence to be considered representative, people think that every segment of a random sequence should reflect the true proportion
- the Strong Law of Small NumbersStrong Law of Small Numbers"The Strong Law of Small Numbers" is a humorous paper by mathematician Richard K. Guy and also the so-called law that it proclaims: "There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." In other words, any given small number appears in far more contexts than may seem...
, an observation made by the mathematician Richard K. Guy