Cleo, the mathematician that tricked Stack Exchange (opens in new tab)

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.

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.