The page states:

In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.

However, I and others were on the scent at least as far back as April, 2023. See for example: https://x.com/TheDavidSJ/status/1650957407902658571

>In January 2025, Cleo was revealed by internet sleuths

this type of sleuthing, when someone is not doing any harm, is typically quite off-putting. if someone is contributing good to the world but trying to maintain some anonymity, it's really rude to try and "out" them.

however, i guess reshetnikov didn't care too much about being exposed as the person behind the name, considering:

>"On 8 February 2025, Reshetnikov posted a Base64-encoded message on his Stack Exchange profile that, when decoded, read "Creator of Cleo"."

I think there are some interesting parallels between what the Cleo account did, and what the large AI companies are doing now with some of the proofs for previously unsolved theorems.

There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.

I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.

Joe McCann and his audience discovered that Cleo was a ploy at ragebaiting the math forum in order to drive engagement for more useful proofs. A real-world Cunningham's Law social experiment.

So maybe OpenAI's ridiculous approach to mathematics has value in how it's ragebaiting us to scrutinize and/or come up with better proofs!

As far as I know, Cleo's bait was deliberate and the author owned up to it eventually. Labs announcing a proof want it believed, not corrected. Any scrutiny is a side effect, and so far the evidence suggests mathematicians mostly get annoyed rather than productive. I'd love to be wrong, but ragebait by accident isn't a strategy.

> for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution

All of the value is in this understanding.

So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.

If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age.

I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.

Ok, where will you shift the goalposts if next year AI will also be superhuman in didactically explaining proofs to humans?

Wherever it fails. A fluent explanation that's subtly wrong is worse than a terse correct proof, because nobody double-checks the fluent one. Someone still has to verify it, and that's the part nobody wants to staff.

The point of understanding is to get better at proving new things. Now that humans are obsolete for proving things, human understanding is unnecessary.

Were any of the 39 answers to a question that was not likely to be from a sock puppet?

Doesn’t necessarily make the solutions less impressive, but it’s kind of a relevant detail that is left out in the Wikipedia summary.

Working backwards is the usual trick for this. Pick a nice closed form, say a polylog combo or some zeta values, find an identity that spits it out, then present the ugly integral as the puzzle. We did something similar for test problems once. A sock puppet asking is plausible, but solving it cold, without knowing the target, is still hard.

Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.

As a non-mathematician I'm confused by this Wikipedia article. Isn't it trivial to fabricate arbitrarily hard integrals by starting from a function with known values and differentiating it?

I understand that people enjoyed the prank, but I think the article doesn't make it clear enough that he was just trolling and wasn't actually solving hard mathematical problems

Yes it is. The existence of a wikipedia page for such a minor piece of internet trolling seems bizarre.

Differentiating is easy, integrating is hard. Wikipedia just documented the asymmetry with a straight face.

> I was frustrated that when I posted questions about integrals on Math.SE, I often received comments like "Why is this interesting?" or "What makes you think that it may have a closed-form solution?"

Not surprised that the rotten culture of unhelpful gatekeeping at Stack Exchange extended beyond stack overflow.

They found out who he was? That's amazing.

Granted this is an interesting curiosity, but Cleo hardly qualifies as a mathematician.

Also, didn't Cleo post the problems themselves?

His Github has has some interesting projects, e.g: https://github.com/VladimirReshetnikov/ProveIt

Heart warming. Sadly we don't seem to get more Cleos from now on

What was the purpose of stalking him..?

The Wikipedia page says that in the early 2000s, he emigrated from his native Uzbekistan. Where too? Of course almost everyone would have the US as their first guess. And they'd be right. What a boon for the Americans to be the default destination for geniuses like this!

But now... What have you guys done? Would the guy even be allowed to come if he wanted to?

Nationalism/politics aside, it seems extremely unlikely he was actually a genius based on the fake account findings in the article.

More likely, he started with the answer he liked & did simpler operations to turn it into a much harder to undo integral problem until none of his symbolic math software could manage to solve it the right way around anymore. Then, he used his now known fake accounts to post the "question" he already had the "answer" to. His self-replies missing the one part (the steps to do it the hard way around by solving the integral instead of creating it) that would have proven he actually did figure out how to solve it 39 out of 39 times.

It'd be like if I generated a 2048 bit RSA key, posted under a fake account asking if anyone could crack it, and then posted under another fake account what the private key was.

We ran a small forum for a few years, and our best contributor was a pseudonymous person who never wanted credit. Nobody got hurt by not knowing who they were. Stack Exchange worked exactly as designed here: answers got judged on whether they were right, not on who wrote them.

Very much analogous to the current AI proofs debate