From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/4025 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Robert J. MacG. Dawson" Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Benford's Law Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:08:17 -0300 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1241019672 11380 80.91.229.2 (29 Apr 2009 15:41:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:41:12 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: rrosebru@mta.ca Wed Oct 17 14:15:22 2007 -0300 Return-path: Envelope-to: categories-list@mta.ca Delivery-date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:15:22 -0300 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1IiCGu-0000v3-3n for categories-list@mta.ca; Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:01:28 -0300 Original-Sender: cat-dist@mta.ca Precedence: bulk X-Keywords: X-UID: 82 Original-Lines: 25 Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:4025 Archived-At: mjhealy@ece.unm.edu wrote: > Does anybody on this list (including you, John) know of a connection > between Benford's Law and any work in category theory? I would really > like to hear about it if so. I doubt if there is much of one. I suppose _some_ sort of connection might be made through the concept of "invariance" - Benford's law holds for distributions that are wide enough not to have a "natural scale". If you cannot give an approximate answer to "how big is a (river/piece of string/data file/bank deposit)?" then the distribution of first digits in (say) centimeters should [waving hands hard] be the same as that in furlongs or wavelengths of green light; and from that property Benford's law follows. On the other hand, humans are approximately of a height, to the point that the foot, hand, cubit, fathom, etc. can be used as rough units in their natural form. Thus there is a natural scale for human heights, and we are not surprised that almost all human heights in meters have a first digit 1 and very few do in inches. -Robert