Frank Benford

Frank Albert Benford Jr. (July 10, 1883 – December 4, 1948) was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.

Benford is also known for having devised, in 1937, an instrument for measuring the refractive index of glass. An expert in optical measurements, he published 109 papers in the fields of optics and mathematics and was granted 20 patents on optical devices.