Mathematics Program Presents

Benford’s Law: The Mysterious Nature of First Digit Distributions

Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb was the first to notice the curious fact that the ten digits do not occur with the same frequency in logarithmic tables. This weird fact was observed on other sequences in nature such as the  Fibonacci sequence, powers of two and factorials. We will learn a little of the history of Benford’s Law (BL) and do some simulations that will give us an insight to understand the reason behind BL. It turns out that many real life datasets follow BL. Understanding which processes follow BL has provided useful applications of BL into financial fraud detection. 

Karin Reinhold Larsson is an associate professor at the University at Albany, SUNY. She was born in Argentina, obtained a licenciatura in mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in mathematics from Ohio State University. Her main research interests are in Ergodic Theory with connections to probability and harmonic analysis. She has served as president of the University Senate and she is involved the local community serving as statistical consultant in our own Peace Project. 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: RKC 111

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