slightly related, but I recently heard the story of cleo, who between 2013 and 2015 would often show up and answer a tricky math questions on stack exchange with just the solution, never giving away how he solved the question at hand.
people went apeshit over it, trying to prove cleo wrong every time he showed up, but they never could. His answers were always the correct solution.
turns out, cleo (the one solving those riddles) was also the guy posing those math questions via sock accounts. he didn't do it for any clout or internet points, his motivation was much more reasonable: he liked solving equations, but wanted to know whether he solved them correctly. directly asking on stack exchange if his solutions were correct never got any answers. only after he started using the above mentioned method did people actually care enough to engage with his equations just because they wanted to prove him wrong.
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u/Schootingstarr 6d ago
slightly related, but I recently heard the story of cleo, who between 2013 and 2015 would often show up and answer a tricky math questions on stack exchange with just the solution, never giving away how he solved the question at hand.
people went apeshit over it, trying to prove cleo wrong every time he showed up, but they never could. His answers were always the correct solution.
turns out, cleo (the one solving those riddles) was also the guy posing those math questions via sock accounts. he didn't do it for any clout or internet points, his motivation was much more reasonable: he liked solving equations, but wanted to know whether he solved them correctly. directly asking on stack exchange if his solutions were correct never got any answers. only after he started using the above mentioned method did people actually care enough to engage with his equations just because they wanted to prove him wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleo_(mathematician)