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Tom Lehrer's Mathematical Songs (1951) (st-andrews.ac.uk)
79 points by NoRagrets on Aug 26, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 44 comments



Tom Lehrer is incredibly witty and funny; he was a mathematician and performer who was active in the 1960's until the 1980's. Some of his stuff is a little dated but most of it is as relevant as ever.

I found three albums of his - "That was the year that was", "An evening wasted with Tom Lehrer" and "Antoher evening wasted". They cover the more famous parts of his repertoire, and for the rest you'll likely have to look through YouTube and the internet.

Highly recommended.


If you like Tom Lehrer then you might also enjoy his British contemporaries Flanders & Swann in "At the drop of a hat" and other albums.

With rare exceptions ("The laws of thermodynamics") they didn't write about the sciences, but they were musically a bit more sophisticated and just as witty.

Their satire was far less biting but was present. Although Michael Flanders did monologue: "The purpose of Satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth - and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again." :)

I recommend their delightful animal song "The Sloth" as having pertinence to my fellows in the HN audience who have trouble with procrastination...

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blDNO5qznjM


On the topic of Flanders and Swann, their song about a gnu[0] (using the then non-standard pronunciation) was one of the inspirations for the naming the GNU project.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwJ4iKv0H70&list=OLAK5uy_m5z...


Nifty, I didn't know that connection, thanks!


On PBS in the US, Mark Russell was also in a similar vein--but mostly political and IMO not as good. Doesn't seem to be readily available.


"Slow Train" about UK railway stations shut in the 60s is great (though about a third of the 28 mentioned were reprieved or reopened so it can seem a bit odd if you visit Chester-le-Street, say.)


Armstrong and Miller have several excellent parodies of Flanders and Swann on YouTube, if you happen to like their somewhat coarse humour.


Also, keep an ear out for what he says between the songs. The introductions are often as witty as the songs themselves.

(It's tempting to recount some here, but I think it's better to hear it from the man himself.)

Happily, although he hasn't performed in decades, Tom Lehrer is still alive today, at the age of 92.


There was a compilation, seems to be "Collection 1953-60," that basically includes all of his stuff.


My favourite is Wernher Von Braun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio


Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once ze rockets are up, who cares where zey come down?

That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.


(which is technically incorrect, because he cared very much for targeting accuracy).


My favourite as well. So harsh, but so fair.


Whether Von Braun was Nazi or not the fake German accent is a little distasteful.


Why is it distasteful? People on this planet speak different languages, and pronounce things in different ways... It was not mocking that he wasn't pronouncing things the same way we were, it was just an imitation of him. Is SNL distasteful when they imitate people?


What do you think of his fake Russian accent in "Lobachevsky"? I think it's great. And isn't there a fake Irish accent in one of his songs?


The Irish Ballad (the Rickety-Tickety-Tin song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQfaRSeaMZQ


https://youtu.be/U_DUaYKJCAA : Who’s next covers accents from a clutch of nations.


Honestly I don't think there is anything wrong with doing fake accents for the purpose of satire (as long as you are punching up, not down).


I think "distasteful" it kind of a moot point when talking about Tom Lehrer's work. See: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, etc.


https://youtu.be/R6qFG0uop9k : ‘I got it from Agnes’.. reminds me of Monty Python’s Medical Song but only..so much gentler..


I love his simple charisma. Ever flashy, just charming. In magic there's a form of magic in between close up magic and stage magic called "parlor magic". I've always thought he had great parlor presence.

On a separate note, I find it interesting that he's making casual jokes about himself being gay/bi. I don't know what the times were like, or really even when that video was made, but do wonder if that raised a few (more, I guess) eyebrows


It was recorded in the '60s, and I think one can probably make one allowance for different tolerances more than 5 decades later.


doesn't have New Math https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA

growing up we had two Tom Lehrer albums (I guess my parents had their good points)


That was the first thing I noticed. I guess it’s the New New Math now. I wonder what he’d have felt about Common Core.


There is a really cool article by buzzfeed of all places detailing Lehrer's career: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer


What next, a Teen Vogue piece on non-euclidean geometry?


I love Tom Lehrer, but I was a little taken aback when I learnt that Lobachevsky was a real mathematician and not as far as anyone knows a plagiarist. Seems harsh to skewer a (long-dead) guy's reputation with such a catchy song.


Yeah, that one took me a quite while to realize as well. As far as I now understand, Lobachevsky was a truly great mathematician and any accusations of plagiarism absolutely unfounded. Lehrer simply chose him because the name went well with the Danny Kaye song "Stanislawsky" which he was paraphrasing. Apparently Lobachevsky's relatives were, understandably, not at all happy with the implications.

It's the one occasion I can think of where I feel Tom Lehrer's satire was truly misdirected. One of many reasons I appreciate him so much is otherwise that when the sharp wit was at someone's expense, they had earned it (and this in contrast to the practice with most contemporary purported comedians, at least in my country).


Over 2'000 years to resolve an open question (Elements, ca. -300 → On the Origin of Geometry, 1829) is a considerable time.

http://www.claymath.org/euclid/index/book-1-postulates (the image is clickable, but it's all greek to me)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate#History

I think Lehrer was counting on both the Danny Kaye reference and his prosody statement to hint at where this song stands with respect to Poe's Law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24281288


Why does it say (1951) in the title? The article says "Last Updated October 2013" and talks about songs that were published in the seventies.


The first work of Tom Lehrer's that I heard is "The Elements", where he recites chemical element names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_(song) ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM


I occupy an interesting intersection in that I went to school for math and science (BS in CS, did math and computational chemistry research) and I also used to play and sing in a piano bar (often in the same night!)

Every once in a while I'd pull out a Tom Lehrer tune, but you really need the right audience for it.

Fun fact: Tom Lehrer and Steven Sondheim were childhood friends.


The man was doing stuff that would have "broken the Internet", years before the Internet even existed.


He taught at UC Santa Cruz from 1972 to 2001. I wonder what his classes were like. Anyone happen to attend?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03922-x


yes, I took "Nature of Math". Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.


At least two kid friendly songs:

https://youtu.be/91BQqdNOUxs : Silent E

https://youtu.be/dB2Ff8H7oVo : LY


+1 ‘That’s Mathematics’: https://youtu.be/y7VQFfusQJk


From the title I thought he generated melodies with math. Instead, he wrote songs about math.


My favorite from the list: https://youtu.be/UQHaGhC7C2E


A scan of Lobachevsky's work, as republished in western languages: http://books.e-heritage.ru/book/10070448

Lehrer's technique here was a common Cold War trope: one daren't mention any second-world achievements directly in english works, but cloaked in enough pejoratives they'd slip past the censorship of the crowd, while people who could evaluate for themselves did.

Looks like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobachevsky_Prize has suffered some endo-mathematical drama recently.

- the inspirational Danny Kaye sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXI2djKeerQ

- and, lest anyone worry about the exhaustivity of my case analysis, Bergman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk_A115Src ("the squaw of the hippopotamus")


Last week there was that opponent of Putin who got poisoned and was sent to a hospital in Omsk and I was like: "Why do I know the name of that random Russian city ?".


Omsk is one of the largest cities in Siberia, and apparently 7th largest in all of Russia. Tomsk is the small city in that song, as it was bypassed by the Trans-Siberian Railway in favor of Novosibirsk.


Omsk (and Tomsk) are wombles...




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