If you tried to fake a giant spreadsheet by spreading the leading digits evenly, a forensic auditor could prove you were lying. In large naturally occurring data sets, the number one leads about 30 percent of the time while nine leads less than 5 percent. This episode traces the discovery from astronomer Simon Newcomb noticing grimy front pages in logarithm tables in 1881, to physicist Frank Benford testing river areas, town populations, molecular weights and Reader's Digest numbers in 1938, and explains the logarithmic scale that makes the pattern inevitable.

We walk through why multiplicative growth, like a bank account compounding at 10 percent, spends most of its time in the ones bracket, why the law survives converting feet to meters, and Ted Hill's 1995 proof that mixing unrelated data sets produces the curve. Then we cover the bounda ...