Recurrence relations and Benford's law (Q2062331)

The paper under review presents several aspects of Benford's law and its connection with recurrence sequences. The relation between Benford's law and recurrence sequences with \emph{constant} coefficients is now classical and is recalled in the paper. The main aim of the paper is to present some relation between Benford's law and recurrence sequences with \emph{non-constant} coefficients. A sequence \((a_n)_n\) of positive real numbers is said to be (strongly)-Benford in base \(b\) or simply \emph{Benford in base} \(b\) if the sequence \((\log_b(a_n))_n\) is uniformly distributed modulo 1. This implies that the set of the integers \(n\) for which the most significant digit of \(n\) in base \(b\) is \(d\) has the asymptotic density \(\log_b (1+1/)d\), the usual Benford's property. For example, if \(\rho\) is a real number such that \(\log_b \rho\) is irrational, the sequence \((a_n)_n = (\rho^n)_n\) (which is a solution of the recurrence relation \(a_{n+1}= \rho a_{n}\)) is Benford in base \(b\). In a similar way, the Fibonacci sequence \((F_n)_n\) (solution of \(F_{n+2} = F_{n+1} + F_n\)) is Benford in base 10, since \(\sqrt{5}\) and \(10\) are mutiplicatively independent over \(\mathbb{Q}\). To a sequence \((a_n)_n\) satisfying the recurrence relation \[ a_{n+1}=f(n)a_n+g(n)a_{n-1} \] the authors associate the sequences \((\lambda(n))_n\) and \((\mu(n))_n\) defined by (they are well defined with the required conditions on \(f\) and \(g\)) \[ f(n) = \lambda(n) + \mu(n) \; ; \; g(n) = -\lambda(n-1) \mu(n). \] Their main results reads Theorem 1.3. With notation (1) and (2) and assuming that \(g(n)/f(n)^2\) tends to \(0\), the sequence \((a_n)_n\) is Benford if and only if \(\left(\prod_{i=1}^n \mu(i)\right)_n\) is Benford. Some applications are given. Finally, the authors discuss generalizations to higher order recurrence sequences as well as to multiplicative recurrence sequences.