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 bachelor's in math and physics from Yale University and a doctorate in math from Princeton University, Miller has supervised over 600 students and authored more than 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 multitasking — especially with his family, who’ve co-authored several papers with him (and even tackled some interesting bridge problems). He can also teach people how to solve a Rubik's Cube poorly in under an hour.