Comment by gspr
10 hours ago
The Wikipedia page says that in the early 2000s, he emigrated from his native Uzbekistan. Where too? Of course almost everyone would have the US as their first guess. And they'd be right. What a boon for the Americans to be the default destination for geniuses like this!
But now... What have you guys done? Would the guy even be allowed to come if he wanted to?
Nationalism/politics aside, it seems extremely unlikely he was actually a genius based on the fake account findings in the article.
More likely, he started with the answer he liked & did simpler operations to turn it into a much harder to undo integral problem until none of his symbolic math software could manage to solve it the right way around anymore. Then, he used his now known fake accounts to post the "question" he already had the "answer" to. His self-replies missing the one part (the steps to do it the hard way around by solving the integral instead of creating it) that would have proven he actually did figure out how to solve it 39 out of 39 times.
It'd be like if I generated a 2048 bit RSA key, posted under a fake account asking if anyone could crack it, and then posted under another fake account what the private key was.