Any remaining suspicions that Benford s Law was merely a fluke were dispelled in 1996. In that year, Theodore Hill of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US, revealed what seems to be the true origin of Benford s Law. In essence, Hill showed that collections of many different types of data obey Benford s Law because such data follow many different distribution patterns. For example, the heights of people follow the famous bell-curve distribution, with relatively few very short or incredibly tall people at the extremes, and most somewhere in between. On the other hand, lottery numbers all of which are equally likely to appear obey the flat-looking uniform distribution.
Seasonal temperatures rise and fall in a wave-like distribution.
Hill s mathematical proof gave solid foundations to what had seemed to many to be just an intriguing and somewhat dubious quirk of data. His findings have also allowed otherwise sceptical researchers to feel comfortable about using Benford s Law in their own work. Long before Hill s proof appeared, Mark Nigrini , now a professor of accountancy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, had been convinced of the value of Benford s Law in fraud detection. By exposing anomalies in the frequency of digits in financial accounts, it had allowed him to unmask many fraudsters. They included that tax-dodging restaurant owner, whose attempts to cook her books were revealed by an analysis of a year s sales figures.