Although I don't do Sudoku I have always been interested in numbers - The Golden ratio, fractals & Fibonacci continue to enthral me. I also have a daughter who is a mathematician - I was an engineer so she must have come from a gene that stripped application out of my crude maths intellect to produce the purified form that she now extols. She introduced me to Benfords Law which I find unbelievably fascinating. Here it is:
Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty.
OK so what! Well if you want to know whether a set of accounts have been - ahem - adjusted - then the natural tendency of human intervention is to randomise the first digit so books that have been modified won't obey Benford's Law whereas a set of un-massaged data would. This test is easy to perform and is now admissable evidence in fraud tribunals. The law applies to so many sets of data it is spooky and finally it emerges that there are links to other natural number sets. I only recently came to appreciate just how Maths is fundamental to understanding the working of the world.
To illustrate the numerical aspect of her Maths brain she told me that she would hide a cache with the £20 she owed me in it at a location given by the following clues. If I wanted my money back I had to solve the puzzle. After several hints I eventually did so but having collected the money I thought it would make a good puzzle for you guys. The only clue I had was that there was a tenuous link to Benford's Law.
Here is the data:
N 5562803716542.3901641372495612
W 035872.48496025714384992536812
You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.
Well done Uilebheist for Finding This First on a dawn raid from sunny Leith