Benford’s law: A Poisson perspective

Benford’s law is a counterintuitive statistical law asserting that the distribution of leading digits, taken from a large ensemble of positive numerical values that range over many orders of scale, is logarithmic rather than uniform (as intuition suggests). In this paper we explore Benford’s law from a Poisson perspective, considering ensembles of positive numerical values governed by Poisson-process statistics. We show that this Poisson setting naturally accommodates Benford’s law and: (i) establish a Poisson characterization and a Poisson multidigit-extension of Benford’s law; (ii) study a system-invariant leading-digit distribution which generalizes Benford’s law, and establish a Poisson characterization and a Poisson multidigit-extension of this distribution; (iii) explore the universal emergence of the system-invariant leading-digit distribution, couple this universal emergence to the universal emergence of the Weibull and Fréchet extreme-value distributions, and distinguish the special role of Benford’s law in this universal emergence; (iv) study the continued-fractions counterpart of the system-invariant leading-digit distribution, and establish a Poisson characterization of this distribution; and (v) unveil the elemental connection between the system-invariant leading-digit distribution and its continued-fractions counterpart. This paper presents a panoramic Poisson approach to Benford’s law, to its system-invariant generalization, and to its continued-fractions counterpart.