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