Recent advances in the theory and applications of Benford’s law | Department of Mathematics

Recent advances in the theory and applications of Benford’s law

Event Information
Event Location: 
GAB 461, 4-5 PM; Refreshments: GAB 472, 3:30 PM
Event Date: 
Monday, October 14, 2013 - 4:00pm

Benford's Law (also called the First-Digit, or Significant-digit Law), is the well known century-old logarithmic distribution of significant digits occurring in many numerical datasets. This unexpected statistical pattern appears in a wide variety of settings from stock market and EBay auction prices, Google searches and census data, to many common deterministic sequences such as the powers of 2 and the Fibonacci numbers. The main goal of this talk, after a quick review of some of the basic theory and latest empirical evidence of BL, will be to describe some of the very recent theoretical advances in this field. These include the appearance of BL in powers of matrices, in powers of random variables, in products of i.i.d. random variables, and in iterations of functions. A basic BL error in Feller that continues to spread will be briefly discussed, along with several new applications and open problems. This talk will be aimed for the non-specialist.