Prime Number Digit Frequencies

Today I became curious about the relative frequencies of the digits that appear in prime numbers (in base 10).

Naturally, I wrote a little program to show the answer - digit-freq2:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings;

use List::Util qw(sum0);
use Math::BigRat;
use Math::Prime::XS qw(primes);

my $min = shift // 10_000;
my $max = shift || 10_000_000;

my @primes = primes( $min, $max );
#warn "$min to $max is ",scalar(@primes)," primes from $primes[0] to $primes[-1]\n";

# Count the number of times a digit is seen
my %digits;
for my $prime ( @primes ) {
    my @parts = split //, $prime;
    $digits{$_}++ for @parts;
}

# Find the total of all digits seen
my $total = sum0 values %digits;

# Compute the proportional frequencies
for my $digit ( keys %digits ) {
    $digits{$digit} = Math::BigRat->new(
        Math::BigInt->new($digits{$digit}),
        Math::BigInt->new($total)
    );
}

# Output the frequencies in sorted order
for my $digit ( sort { $digits{$a} <=> $digits{$b} || $a <=> $b } keys %digits ) {
#    print "$digit: ", $digits{$digit}->as_float, "\n";
    printf "%d: %.4f\n", $digit, $digits{$digit}->as_float;
}

For primes up to 10 (4 of them) we get this:

2: 0.2500
3: 0.2500
5: 0.2500
7: 0.2500

For primes up to 100 (25) we get:

6: 0.0435
8: 0.0435
2: 0.0652
4: 0.0652
5: 0.0652
9: 0.1304
1: 0.1957
3: 0.1957
7: 0.1957

For primes up to 1,000 (168) we get:

0: 0.0316
8: 0.0632
2: 0.0674
5: 0.0695
6: 0.0695
4: 0.0716
9: 0.1411
3: 0.1579
1: 0.1642
7: 0.1642

At 10,000 (1,229) we get:

0: 0.0492
8: 0.0744
4: 0.0763
5: 0.0763
6: 0.0782
2: 0.0829
9: 0.1369
7: 0.1382
3: 0.1435
1: 0.1443

At 100,000 (9,592) we get:

0: 0.0586
8: 0.0793
6: 0.0804
4: 0.0811
5: 0.0820
2: 0.0839
9: 0.1317
7: 0.1326
3: 0.1339
1: 0.1365

At 1,000,000 (78,498) we get:

0: 0.0660
8: 0.0838
6: 0.0842
5: 0.0846
4: 0.0848
2: 0.0860
9: 0.1264
7: 0.1268
3: 0.1278
1: 0.1296

For an increasing number of primes, the order of increasing frequency appears to stabilize at 0, 8, 6, 5, 4, 2, 9, 7, 3, 1.

So for instance, at 10,000,000 (664,579) we get:

0: 0.0710
8: 0.0864
6: 0.0867
5: 0.0868
4: 0.0871
2: 0.0878
9: 0.1225
7: 0.1228
3: 0.1238
1: 0.1250

For primes between 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 we get the same frequency order.

Fascinating.

(This link seems to indicate otherwise, but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet...)