Talk:Cleo (mathematician)

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A fact from Cleo (mathematician) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 March 2025 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the identity of Cleo, who provided online answers to complex mathematics problems without showing any work, was revealed over a decade later in 2025?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2025/March. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Cleo (mathematician).

Wikipedia

Cleo has been found. I just wanted to note somehow so some people will update the Article on Cleo (mathematician).

Here is the link to the X post explaining everything concisely:

https://x.com/deedydas/status/1891537926372356178 2603:8081:6B00:660F:EC59:A7:37D1:D86B (talk) 23:31, 25 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cleo's identity was part of the article previously, but per a discussion on WikiProject Mathematics [1] it was removed. I'm waiting for further consensus before I re-add that information. GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 05:52, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 11:43, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that the identity of mysterious mathematician Cleo, who provided answers to complex integrals on Stack Exchange without showing any work, was finally revealed after over a decade in 2025?

Source: https://leudqmqvebuspimd.1tw.live/feature/2025/02/20/polzovateli-bolshe-desyati-let-vyyasnyali-lichnost-genialnoy-zhenschiny-matematika-kleo

Reviewed:

Created by GregariousMadness (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.

GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 15:41, 27 February 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Absolutely love this! Looks like the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet was not the only Internet mystery solved recently.. anyways. Hook is definitely interesting, cited and QPQ not required. Article is eligible, well-cited and written, although I have small comments for it before I can approve this DYK: "closed form" currently points to a disambiguation page which needs to be corrected; Cloe's Srinivasa Ramanujan quotation should be cited at the end; and I would replace the YouTube citation with a direct one for Cloe's tweet. ❧ LunaEatsTuna (talk), proudly editing since 2018 (and just editing since 2017) – posted at 01:24, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Please note the long discussion on the quality of sourcing of this article at WT:WPM#Nominated Cleo (mathematician) for GA. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:48, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you, I'll make the edits as soon as I can. GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 03:14, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  - User:LunaEatsTuna — I've made the edits as requested, though I was unable to find a direct link to the Twitter quote, since it was communicated over DMs, not as a Tweet. Thank you for the review! GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 00:36, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Really pleased with it now! An NPOV issue was brought up on the article's talk page but it looks sorted to me now. ❧ LunaEatsTuna (talk), proudly editing since 2018 (and just editing since 2017) – posted at 12:03, 5 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Non-neutral point of view?

@GregariousMadness It seems that the article as currently written is pushing a non-neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). Specifically, (see https://math.stackexchange.com/conduct, as well as the numerous discussions on https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/ and the current consensus guidelines there), the overall goal of MathStackExchange is to build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, .... That has been their goal from the beginning and continues to be. That is why answers without any justification are frowned upon. Cleo's answers may have shown the cleverness of the answerer, but they do nothing to foster understanding of mathematics and to serve as a good answer that people in the future will be able to go back to in order to understand why something works. That is exactly why the math stackexchange community is against this type of answers.

But the Cleo article seems to glorify the minority view that just showing cleverness without justification is a good thing. Specifically, the paragraph starting with The Math.SE community initially questioned the value of answers without proofs. ... It's not just "initially". And also the last quote in the Legacy paragraph: ... here’s someone flaunting not showing their work, and people are cheering behind that. Actually, only a very small minority of people were cheering this. Most users of Math.SE are not, as already explained above. So I would suggest the removal of this last quote, really one opinion of one person. And also a more balanced rewrite of the "initially questioned" paragraph.

Again, nothing wrong with being clever and not showing your work. But Math.SE is not and never was an appropriate forum for displaying that. PatrickR2 (talk) 19:48, 3 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the review! Yes, you're right — after reading through the article again it does sound like a glorification of Cleo's actions. I've edited the article to be more neutral per your comments. If there's anything else I should change, please let me know! GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 20:59, 3 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the update. PatrickR2 (talk) 23:48, 3 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a new source in Focus (German magazine)

Zwölf Jahre rätselte das Internet, wer Cleo ist - nun ist das Rätsel gelöst 174.208.224.238 (talk) 06:14, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch. The original is at Spektrum der Wissenschaft [de]: https://www.spektrum.de/kolumne/wer-ist-cleo-internet-detektive-vermuten-vladimir-reshetnikov/2255256. Unfortunately they seem to have identified the wrong Vladimir Reshetnikov: the astronomer http://www.astro.spbu.ru/staff/resh/cv.html is not the same person as the software engineer https://github.com/VladimirReshetnikov. The article otherwise appears reliable; its observation that many of the integrands do not have closed-form antiderivatives, implying using the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus to construct the question/answer pairs ahead of time would not have been possible, seems relevant and we should consider adding it to the article. Preimage (talk) 01:53, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]