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Getting at the Truth - Part 2

Author
American Mathematical Society
Published
Fri 10 Dec 2010
Episode Link
http://www.ams.org/samplings/mathmoments/podcast-mom-rights-2.mp3

Mathematics has helped investigators in several major cases of human rights abuses and election fraud. Among them: The 2009 election in Iran. A mathematical result known as Benford's Law states that the leading digits of truly random numbers aren't distributed uniformly, as might be expected. Instead, smaller digits, such as 1's, appear much more frequently than larger digits, such as 9's. Benford's Law and other statistical tests have been applied to the 2009 election and suggest strongly that the final totals
are suspicious.

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