I think a lot of people missed the point of the article. Yeah, it's basically memory offsets/pointer arithmetic. But the difference here is "because indices are memory offsets and it just makes sense" and "because indices are memory offsets and I have the research to back it up".
The point of the article is the impressive research.
Emailing two retired people and then slapping together 20 paragraphs full of hub-bub about nothing is not 'impressive research'. It's not even 'research'.
Well, the third point of the article was that research papers were too expensive. Maybe there's more to this but we have to paid the IEEE $20 to see it.
The point of the article is the impressive research.