Doddering old cranks, crappy refereeing, and gender politics.

This briefly pegged the Intellectual Dork Web's outrage meters a week or so ago.

This sentence alone should cause your crank detectors to twitch.

I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles

Riiiight...because evolutionary biologists are idiots and were waiting for an mathematician to come along and apply 'simple intuitive mathematical arguments' to solve a problem they hadn't figured out in 150 years. But honestly, some mathematicians and physicists really do think like this. I've met several. This is the cartoon posted on my office door.

He's obviously written his own wiki page, and its hilarious. His life's work is "Benford's law", which says that in large collections of numbers, more of the numbers than average will have small leading digits. I can lay out a proof for that in 5 minutes, and could write up a rigorous proof in an afternoon. Let's say you have a random set of numbers in a range 1 to 100,000; then on average the leading digit has an equal probablility of being any number between 1 and 9. On the other hand, if the range is 1 - 200,000, half (actually 55%) will have the leading digit 1. If you now take an ensemble of all possible ranges, some will be like 1-100,000; some will be like 1-200,000, and some will be intermediate. The overall result will be a preponderance of 1s, fewer 2s, still fewer 3s. That's his life's work. That's what he calls a 'law'. Sheesh.

I have no idea if there was some gender politics behind this paper being disappeared, but I suspect the main reason was it was just plain rotten and embarrassing. The real scandal is the abysmal standard of refereeing at most academic journals. I bet the editor saw he had an academic address, rubber stamped it, and then when he had to look at it again, said 'oh crap'.

But in fact, we're not even really talking of journals here. The Mathematical Intelligencer is more a pop-math magazine containing cute idiosyncratic historical anecdotes, gee-whiz paradoxes, etc.. It doesn't portray iteself otherwise. It says it's written in an engaging, informal style and Humor is welcome, as are puzzles, poetry, fiction, and art. I mean, good stuff, glad it's there and all, but not really a journal. And let's face it, "Here's whai you gurlz can't be math genii like me and muh pal Sergei" isn't that light-hearted.

And the

widely respected online research journal, the New York Journal of Mathematics

(impact factor 0.55; LOL) appears to be one of the far-too-common generic open-access "journals" where you can pad out your publication list without bothering with the fuss and muss of real peer review. I can well imagine they didn't want too much scrutiny.

But hey, these days, he can just get his own domain or blog and publish the masterwork online. Then we can all come marvel at it and curse the system that suppresses geniuses like him. And curse those eeevil feminist harpies that brand reel sciencey stuff as heresy.