A Mathematical Study of Authorship Attribution

Abstract: This presentation is accessible to general audience, including undergraduate and graduate students. The recent controversy surrounding the authorship of "The Cuckoo's Calling" by Robert Galbraith had become a headline news in the world. While information leakage was ultimately responsible for the disclosure, mathematics and computer science had played a significant role as well. In this talk I will discuss how mathematics can be used to help with authorship attribution, including for the aforementioned book. I will present a case study where we analyze the long standing authorship controversy surrounding "Dream of the Red Chamber", widely considered to be the greatest masterpiece in Chinese literature. In addition, we shall examine other controversies, e.g. Did Obama write his book "Dreams from my Father" or did Bill Ayers write it? We show how modern techniques such as machine learning can be effective in such investigations.