Cleo was a pseudonymous contributor on Mathematics Stack Exchange from 2013-2015 who gained notoriety for posting 39 concise, often cryptic answers to very difficult integration problems. Solutions typically arrived within hours, asserted closed-form results without derivations, and sometimes invoked surprising constants (for example, a resolved integral expressed via the golden ratio). The pattern provoked admiration and skepticism: some compared the style to Ramanujan, while many users criticized the lack of explanatory steps as contrary to the site’s educational mission. Community members independently supplied full proofs for several of Cleo’s claims, most notably a detailed validation of the golden-ratio result that elicited widespread recognition for its author.
Investigations over years by Reddit users and later a 2025 YouTube inquiry traced links among several accounts and uncovered account-recovery metadata tying Cleo to Vladimir Reshetnikov, an Uzbekistani-American software developer and former Microsoft employee who studied theoretical physics. Reshetnikov ultimately confirmed he created Cleo and several related personas, posting an encoded message reading "Creator of Cleo" and explaining the persona was intended to draw attention to neglected problems and spur others to produce full solutions. Identification rested on overlapping email recovery information and matching account behavior rather than any single mathematical signature.
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