The law of small numbers may refer to
- The Law of Small Numbers (book), authored by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
- The Poisson distribution. Sometimes probability distributions are called laws, and the use of that name for this distribution originated in the book The Law of Small Numbers
- Hasty generalization, 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 theory 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 Numbers, an observation made by the mathematician Richard K. Guy
- the Intellectual Law of Small Numbers, an observation by the sociologist Randall Collins in his book The Sociology of Philosophies
Famous quotes containing the words law, small and/or numbers:
“It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.”
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956)
“When any one of our relations was found to be a person of a very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house I ever took care to lend him a riding-coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of small value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)