Why hello fellow math nerds. This is Tuleka Bose, senior multimedia editor at Scientific American.

If you miss that famous Scientific American Martin Gardner column from the 1950s.

Never fear, we have some great mathematics content coming your way in the new year.

But for now, I'd like to leave you with one of my favorite stories from this last year hosted and reported by the incredibly

talented Allison partial. It tracks the story of Cleo, a mysterious user on a math stack exchange known for unleashing a series of rapid-fire

drive-by answers on the forum without showing any of her work.

Between 2013 and 2015, username's Cleo did this about 37 times, driving everyone

with graduate level STEM degrees a little, well wild. But who was Cleo? Allison takes us into the story.

It's a bit of an urban legend in mathematics. There's a sort of a romance to the story in a way.

I'm Allison partial. You're listening to science quickly.

Today, we've got an episode about a mysterious figure in the online

math world. They disappeared years ago, but there's still sparking debate and speculation. We all love a good puzzle.

Some people have their crosswords.

Some people play Sudoku.

Other people are still doing wirdle.

But Ron Gordon, a patent agent and a former physicist in Massachusetts,

does hardcore calculus. Back in 2013, when our story takes place, he spent enough time on this online forum called Math Stack Exchange that it could have qualified as a full-time job.

I was working my full-time job and then I was on Stack Exchange. Plus I had a family too. I was having so much fun with it that I just didn't even keep

track of how many hours I was dedicating to it. The mathematics Stack Exchange

website is like Yahoo Answers if the people on Yahoo Answers had graduate level STEM degrees. Now Ron Gordon has

solved 2,954 math problems in his decade on Stack exchange but he's most

famous for his answer to one integral in particular.

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