Without taking the time to read the rest of the book, I am suspicious of the author's claims that he has really solved the problem. Consider: - Wolfram Mathwo

Without taking the time to read the rest of the book, I am suspicious of the author's claims that he has really solved the problem. Consider: - Wolfram Mathworld references this topic and claims Benford's Law was put on a rigorous footing in 1998 (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html), but this is not even mentioned in the book. - the author makes "straw-man" type claims that (unnamed) prominent mathematicians view Benford's law as "paranormal". Also see the last two paragraphs on the first page of the original article, where the author dismisses the idea of a "universal distribution", which is used at Mathworld to give a heuristic derivation (suppose some rule governs this distribution -> apply scale invariance -> derive needed properties) - it seems like he misunderstood this. - the author claims that he is the first to have solved this mystery, but doesn't reference any literature since 1976 - he claims on a blog (http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/55.php http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/55.php) that he tried to publish in journals, but was rejected because mathematicians weren't interested. He then published in a textbook, not even in some sort of paper. His "proof" is really long, uses very elementary mathematics and unnecessary computer programs, and refers back to other parts of his book (so that I don't want to actually try to parse the whole thing and see if I believe it). Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicions? That said, Benford's Law is really cool.