Szego Seminar: More 7 or more 8?

Abstract: Consider the sequence consists of the first digit of the number 2^n, that is, the sequence will be {1,2,4,8,1,3,6,1,2,5,1,2,…}. Gelfand proposed a question asking whether 7 is more likely to appear than 8 in the given sequence above. In this talk, we would like to answer this question using a seemly unrelated tool, called ergodic theory.  With this, the problem can be answered in a clever and elegant way.

Host: Pooja Joshi