Benford Behavior of a Higher-Dimensional Fragmentation Process

Nature and our world have a bias! Roughly $30\%$ of the time the number $1$ occurs as the leading digit in many datasets base $10$. This phenomenon is known as Benford's law and it arrises in diverse fields such as the stock market, optimizing computers, street addresses, Fibonacci numbers, and is often used to detect possible fraud. Based on previous work, we know that different forms of a one-dimensional stick fragmentation result in pieces whose lengths follow Benford's Law. We generalize this result and show that this can be extended to any finite-dimensional ``volume''. We further conjecture that even lower-dimensional volumes, under the unrestricted fragmentation process, follow Benford's Law

Benfordness of the Generalized Gamma Distribution

The generalized gamma distribution shows up in many problems related to engineering, hydrology as well as survival analysis. Earlier work has been done that estimated the deviation of the exponential and the Weibull distribution from Benford's Law. We give a mathematical explanation for the Benfordness of the generalized gamma distribution and present a measure for the deviation of the generalized gamma distribution from the Benford distribution

Probabilistic Parking Functions

We consider the notion of classical parking functions by introducing randomness and a new parking protocol, as inspired by the work presented in the paper ``Parking Functions: Choose your own adventure,'' (arXiv:2001.04817) by Carlson, Christensen, Harris, Jones, and Rodr\'iguez. Among our results, we prove that the probability of obtaining a parking function, from a length $n$ preference vector, is independent of the probabilistic parameter $p$. We also explore the properties of a preference vector given that it is a parking function and discuss the effect of the probabilistic parameter $p$. Of special interest is when $p=1/2$, where we demonstrate a sharp transition in some parking statistics. We also present several interesting combinatorial consequences of the parking protocol. In particular, we provide a combinatorial interpretation for the array described in OEIS A220884 as the expected number of preference sequences with a particular property related to occupied parking spots, which solves an open problem of Novelli and Thibon posed in 2020 (arXiv:1209.5959). Lastly, we connect our results to other weighted phenomena in combinatorics and provide further directions for research.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 4 table