alt.hn

5/20/2025 at 5:47:55 AM

Cleo, the mathematician that tricked Stack Exchange

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleo_(mathematician)

by schaum

5/20/2025 at 6:38:18 AM

>This investigation identified several suspicious profiles that frequently interacted with Cleo, including those of Vladimir Reshetnikov and Laila Podlesny.

Is the assumption that Vladimir posed as Laila to post the, presumably already solved problems, and then posed as Cleo to 'answer' them quickly? Wiki doesn't come out and make this accusation, but the apparent connection between the 3 accounts makes it seem like that's the case.

by Suppafly

5/20/2025 at 6:53:52 AM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076987

by krackers

5/20/2025 at 3:47:01 PM

in this thread someone commented

1. People love correcting other people. If you want to get an answer, don’t ask for the solution — instead, post a (possibly) wrong answer under a different pseudonym. People will then want to prove you wrong. 2. Even more so if you’re a woman.

that comment was flagged, and while on the face of it, without further context, that may be reasonable, the video in the above linked thread reveals that engaging people to post an answer was in fact the motivation for creating the cleo account, essentially supporting the statement made in the flagged comment.

by em-bee

5/20/2025 at 8:40:20 PM

Jfc, of course it was downvoted.

by nixosbestos

5/21/2025 at 1:43:58 AM

Sorry let me clarify, this site is a mini shit hole full of projecting insecure men. Xoxo, never change.

by nixosbestos

5/20/2025 at 10:07:37 AM

As someone who struggles slightly with maths despite working in physics and engineering, I am always in awe of those who can do math so easily. You do occasionally come across those who can do math with minimal intermediate steps and it is mind blowing to watch.

by ktallett

5/20/2025 at 4:36:50 PM

I think he was doing the intermediate steps, but just posting the answer to draw out other people to do the intermediate steps, to see how other people were approaching it.

by Suppafly

5/20/2025 at 7:40:09 PM

The way I had understood it was that the author arrived at these problems by incrementally modifying complicated integral formulas just up to the point where Mathematica couldn't solve them, and then used the solution from Mathematica for the previous iteration, his intuition and some ad-hoc methods to make an educated guess for the answer for the "unsolvable" integral. I suppose those can be called intermediate steps, but not in the usual sense.

by v9v

5/20/2025 at 8:00:03 AM

cool. reads like a Benjamin Labatut book

by dnlserrano

5/20/2025 at 5:47:55 AM

[flagged]

by schaum