Slides and handouts for Bentley visit (February 1st, 2010)

• Slides for my talk: Benford's law, or: Why the IRS cares about number theory!
• Papers by myself and colleagues:
  • Benford's law, values of L-functions and the 3x+1 problem (with Alex Kontorovich), Acta Arithmetica. (120 (2005), no. 3, 269–297).  pdf.
  • Benford's Law applied to hydrology data - results and relevance to other geophysical data (with Mark Nigrini), Mathematical Geology (39 (2007), no. 5, 469--490).  pdf
  • The Modulo 1 Central Limit Theorem and Benford's Law for Products (with Mark Nigrini), International Journal of Algebra. (2 (2008), no. 3, 119--130). pdf
  • Order statistics and Benford's law (with Mark Nigrini), International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences (Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 382948, 19 pages, doi:10.1155/2008/382948)  pdf
  • Chains of distributions, hierarchical Bayesian models and Benford's Law (with D. Jang, J. U. Kang, A. Kruckman and J. Kudo), Journal of Algebra, Number Theory: Advances and Applications. (volume 1, number 1 (March 2009), 37--60)   pdf
• Online bibliography of Benford's law
  • see also the compilation by Hurlimann: 1881 to 2006
• Some popular / nice articles :
  • Mark Nigrini: I've got your number.
  • Nice survey by Ralph Raimi (JStor access required).
  • Ted Hill:
    • A statistical derivation of the significant digit law.
    • The first digit phenomenon.
  • Mathworld's page.
  • Wikipedia's page.
• Workshop on Applications of Benford's Law (homepage from a conference I helped organize back in '07).

I've worked with many undergraduate and graduate students on problems related to Benford's law; if you're interested in pursuing any of these further, please drop me a line at sjm1 AT williams.edu