Question: Benford's law Faked numbers in tax returns, invoices, or expense account claims often display patterns that aren't present in legitimate records. Some patterns, like too many round numbers, are obvious and easily avoided by a clever crook. Others are more subtle. It is a striking fact that the first digits of numbers in legitimate records often follow a model known as Benford's law.7 Call the first digit of a randomly chosen record X for short. Benford's law gives this probability model for X (note that a first digit can't be 0):
(a) Show that this is a legitimate probability distribution.
(b) Make a histogram of the probability distribution. Describe what you see.
(c) Describe the event X ≥ 6 in words. What is P(X ≥ 6)?
(d) Express the event "first digit is at most 5" in terms of X. What is the probability of this event?