Benford's Law and its applications

Speaker Name: Ryan Gantner (rgantner at sjfc dot edu )

Speaker Afiliation: St. John Fisher College

Abstract: We'll explore what Benford's Law is and the historical contexts surrounding its proposal.
Many, many examples of data sets will be presented that roughly follow Benford's Law (and a few that don't). Some basic statistics (primarily the chi-squared goodness of fit test) will be introduced to quantify how well certain data sets follow the distribution. We'll examine some basic arguments for why this law seems to arise in nature, and talk about some interesting currently-used applications. 

Target Audience: The ideas of logarithm, probability distribution, and a chi-squared goodness of fit test will be presented, but only knowledge of the logarithm will be assumed. This does not require any specific calculus knowledge.