Mathematical Moments From The American Mathematical Society

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. Ethnic cleansing. When Slobodan Milosevic went on trial, it was his contention that the mass exodus of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was due to NATO bombings and the activities of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army rather than anything he had ordered. A team collected data on the flow of refugees to test those hypotheses and was able to refute Milosevic's claim in its entirety. Guatemalan disappearances. Here, statistics is being used to extract information from over 80 million Nation