Law of small numbers

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