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 of, law, small and/or numbers:
“What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed to Nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)