The Surprising Accuracy of Benford's Law in Mathematics

Abstract

Benford's law is an empirical ``law'' governing the frequency of leading digits in numerical data sets. Surprisingly, for mathematical sequences the predictions derived from it can be uncannily accurate. For example, among the first billion powers of $2$, exactly $301029995$ begin with digit 1, while the Benford prediction for this count is $10^9{\log }_{10}2=301029995.66\dots$. Similar ``perfect hits'' can be observed in other instances, such as the digit $1$ and $2$ counts for the first billion powers of $3$. We prove results that explain many, but not all, of these surprising accuracies, and we relate the observed behavior to classical results in Diophantine approximation as well as recent deep conjectures in this area.

Accepted for publication in the American Mathematical Monthly