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
* Strong law of small numbers, [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrongLawofSmallNumbers.html] , "There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." In other words, any given small number appears in far more contexts than may seem reasonable, simply because small numbers appear so often and yet are so few.