Frank Albert Benford Jr. (July 10, 1883 – December 4, 1948) was an American

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

best known for rediscovering and generalizing

Benford's Law Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small.Arno Berger and Theodore ...

, a statistical statement about the occurrence of digits in lists of data. (subscription required) Benford is also known for having devised, in 1937, an instrument for measuring the refractive index of glass. An expert in optical measurements, he published 109 papers in the fields of optics and mathematics and was granted 20 patents on optical devices.

Early life

He was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His date of birth is given variously as May 29 or July 10, 1883. At the age of 6 his family home was destroyed by the

Johnstown Flood The Johnstown Flood (locally, the Great Flood of 1889) occurred on Friday, May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River, upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylv ...

Education

He graduated from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1910.

Career

Benford worked for

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

, first in the Illuminating Engineering Laboratory for 18 years, then the Research Laboratory for 20 years until retiring in July 1948. He was working as a research physicist when he made the rediscovery of Benford's law, and spent years collecting data before publishing in 1938, citing more than 20,000 values from a diverse set of sources including statistics from baseball, atomic weights, the areas of rivers and numbering of articles in magazines.

Death

He died suddenly at his home on December 4, 1948.

References

1883 births 1948 deaths People from Johnstown, Pennsylvania University of Michigan alumni 20th-century American physicists Information theory Optical engineers {{US-scientist-stub