Math and the City

judson.blogs.nytimes.com

57 pointsrobg4 comments

If you like that you might also be interested in Benford's Law which points out some really unexpected Digit distributions in a lot of data sets.

Smeed's law is one my favorites. It accurately predicts the traffic fatality rate as a function of motor vehicle registrations per capita. It is accurate almost everywhere it has been tested, for over 50 years.

Your comment got me curious about Smeed's law, the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeeds_law).

Smeed himself took his law as expressing a truth about group psychology: people would take advantage of improvements in automobiles or infrastructure to drive ever more recklessly in the interests of speed until deaths rose to a socially unacceptable level, at which point safety would become more important and recklessness less tolerated.

Your link should have an apostrophe - Smeed's, not Smeeds.

Odd, it seems as though HN eats the apostrophe. This link should work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law

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