An urban legend claims that there are as many rats as people in New York City, but a statistician says that's not true, NBC News reported. Jonathan Auerbach, a doctoral student in the statistics department at Columbia University, used data from reports of rats called into the city's non-emergency number to arrive at his number: 2 million rats in a city of more than 8 million people. But Auerbach said even that number might be an overestimation, explaining that several people may have reported the same rat colony multiple times.
