Our colloquium series offers a diverse platform for research scholars, faculty, students, and industry experts to share and exchange ideas, fostering discussion and networking across mathematics, statistics, and data science.
Dr. Steven J. Miller from Williams College will speak at this week's colloquium on "Benford's Law: Why the IRS might care about the 3x+1 problem and zeta(s)."
Abstract: Many systems exhibit a digit bias. For example, the first digit base 10 of the Fibonacci numbers or of 2^n equals 1 about 30% of the time; the IRS uses this digit bias to detect fraudulent corporate tax returns. This phenomenon, known as Benford's Law, was first noticed by observing which pages of log tables were most worn from age -- it's a good thing there were no calculators 100 years ago! We'll discuss the general theory and applications, talk about some fun examples (ranging from the 3x+1 problem to the Riemann zeta function), and if time permits discuss some current open problems suitable for undergraduate research projects.
Speaker Bio: Graduated with a B.S. in math and physics from Yale and a Ph.D. in math from Princeton, Miller has supervised 600+ students and written 200+ papers in accounting, computer science, economics, geophysics, marketing, mathematics, operations research, physics, sabermetrics, and statistics. He's the Associate Director of the Williams SMALL REU, a founding member of the Polymath Jr Summer Research Program (and always looking for new collaborators), and the President of the Fibonacci Association. He loves multi-tasking, preferably with his family (who have published a few papers with him, and some interesting bridge problems), and can teach people how to poorly solve a rubik's cube in under an hour.
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