# Most numbers are boring, asymptotically speaking.

##### 2006-12-10 08:03:55 +0000personal

Let $f(n)$ be the number of Google hits for the integer $n$. Then $f(578)$ is about 100 million, and $f(1156)$, that is, the number of hits for a number twice as big, is about 40 million, a bit less than half as big. Doubling the input continues to halve the output: $f(2312)$ is about 20 million (half again!), and $f(4624)$ is about 8 million, and $f(9248)$ is about 4 million.

There are about half as many pages talking about numbers that are twice as big. This is an example of a power law, and indeed, a log-log plot of $f$ looks linear to my blurry vision:

Doing a linear regression in R gives the red line, or in symbols, $$f(x) \approx 5,800,000,000 / x^{1.029}.$$ Rather humorously, this means that $f(a)/f(b) \approx b/a$. In the end, this is not so surprising: Zipf's law says that, in a corpus of naturally occuring text, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank; here, we have a similar phenomenon at work: roughly, the popularity of a number is inversely proportional to its size.

In other words, while the number of integers expressible with fewer than $n$ bits grows exponentially in $n$, the number of pages discussing integers expressible with fewer than $n$ bits grows linearly in $n$; being silly, I'd say that this is an asymptotic version of the claim that most large numbers are uninteresting. After all, popular numbers have a lot of fan sites.