Related papers: Benford's law from 1881 to 2006

The Weak Law of Large Numbers is traced chronologically from its inception as Jacob Bernoulli's Theorem in 1713, through De Moivre's Theorem, to ultimate forms due to Uspensky and Khinchin in the 1930s, and beyond. Both aspects of Jacob…

This is a collection of variants of Schanuel's conjecture and the known dependencies between them. It was originally written in 2007, and made available for a time on my webpage. I have been asked by a few people to make it available again…

There are now many theoretical explanations for why Benford's law of digit bias surfaces in so many diverse fields and data sets. After briefly reviewing some of these, we discuss in depth recurrence relations. As these are discrete…

In the literature, Benford's Law is considered for base-b expansions where b>1 is an integer. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of leading "digits" of a sequence of positive integers under other expansions such as Zeckendorf…

It is known that increasing powers of a continuous random variable converge in distribution to Benford's law as the exponent approaches infinity. The rate of convergence has been estimated using Fourier analysis, but we present an…

Many mathematical, man-made and natural systems exhibit a leading-digit bias, where a first digit (base 10) of 1 occurs not 11\% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but rather 30\%. This phenomenon is known…

Feller's classic text 'An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications' contains a derivation of the well known significant-digit law called Benford's law. More specifically, Feller gives a sufficient condition ("large spread")…

This note is a somewhat-lighthearted comment on a recent paper by David Wallace, arXiv:0906.2718[quant-ph] entitled "A formal proof of the Born rule from decision-theoretic assumptions".

This doctoral dissertation presents an in-depth analysis of the first six chapters of Eddington's Fundamental Theory, sometimes referred to as his 'statistical' theory, in the context of discoveries and advancements made since its original…

We review different studies of the Periodic Law and the set of chemical elements from a mathematical point of view. This discussion covers the first attempts made in the 19th century up to the present day. Mathematics employed to study the…

Benford's law is widely used for fraud-detection nowadays. The underlying assumption for using the law is that a "regular" dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon. In this paper, we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster…

Benford's Law is an empirical law which predicts the frequency of significant digits in databases corresponding to various phenomena, natural or artificial. Although counter intuitive at the first sight, it predicts a higher occurrence of…

The aim of this paper is to describe the origin, first solutions, further progress, the state of art, and a new ansatz in the treatment of a problem dating back to the 1920's, which still has not found a satisfactory solution and deserves…

This paper gives a short review of the history of statistical physics starting from D. Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases in the 18th century until the recent new developments in nonequilibrium kinetic theory in the last decades of this…

A brief but complete historical survey of the theory of equilibrium figures from its early origins, dating back to 17th-century, until the latest 20th-century developments, with a view towards its applications, is carried out.

We analyzed a large selection of classical musical pieces composed by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, and found a surprising connection with mathematics. For each composer, we extracted the time intervals each note was…

This is a short survey of work on percolation and first-passage percolation since the publication (in 1996 and 1984, respectively) of the two authors' Saint-Flour notes on these topics.

The first digit law, also known as Benford's law or the significant digit law, is an empirical phenomenon that the leading digit of numbers from real world sources favors small ones in a form $\log(1+{1}/{d})$, where $d=1, 2, ..., 9$. Such…

Shannon(1951) and Yavuz(1974) estimated the entropy of real documents. This note drives an upper bound of entropy from the parameter of the power law.

The following work is written in easy language for college level students. It shows how the first digit probabilities of a group of continuous real-valued functions can be calculated. Thus, examples explaining how the probabilities are…