Benford's law and the C$β$E

Abstract: We study the individual digits for the absolute value of the characteristic polynomial for the Circular $\beta$-Ensemble. We show that, in the large $N$ limit, the first digits obey Benford's Law and the further digits become uniformly distributed. Key to the proofs is a bound on the rate of convergence in total variation norm in the CLT for the logarithm of the absolute value of the characteristic polynomial.