Frank Benford was born on 29 May 1883 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1910. After graduation, Benford worked for the next 38 years at the General Electric company. He died on December 4, 1948, a few months after retiring from GE.
Benford's work at GE mostly involved optics. But to students of probability, he is best known for the probability distribution that seems to govern the significant digits in real data sets. This distribution is now known as Benford's law in his honor, although the law was actually discovered earlier by the astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb.