The mathematician and musical satirist has died at the age of 97. The link gives some of his better known songs but the ones I like best are his parody of My Darling Clementine
and the song about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel.
This was somewhat unfair to Alma, portraying her merely as someone whose chief talent was to work her way through many famous men. She was, in fact, an accomplished composer and author in her own right.
I also love his song:
I’m spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica!
A true classic of the holiday season.
He had a great song about the mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky!
As a student of computer engineering I appreciated his help: “Octal arithmetic is like decimal arithmetic without thumbs.”
Katydid @2
As a joke Lehrer included a reference to that song (see #3 in bibliography) in an otherwise serious internal research paper at the NSA which is declassified and published here: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF
@4, well, that’s just AWESOME! Thanks for sharing that tidbit of information.
My parents had a Lehrer album from the early 1960s when I was growing up, and we listened to it from time to time. That man was very smart and also a talented singer and musician. I didn’t appreciate his music when I was young, but listening to it again, I’m impressed.
re the Lobachevsky joke -- it took 60 years for anyone to discover the reference! Someone told the full story on Bluesky yesterday, if you want to read more -- https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3luxxx27nos23
And I can’t drop the link in here, but if you can access the NYT obituary, it turns out he outlived his own obituary writer by 2 years, which seems rather gloriously apt!
I remember “The Elements”, just the names of the chemical elements sung to the tune of “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance.
Lassi Hippeläinen @3
Either way, it’s digital.
(sorry, not sorry)
“Be Prepared” was one of the songs my parents sang to us while we were growing up.
We had a couple of his records.
I remember discovering years later that some of the songs on the educational program “The Electric Company” (which was kind of a middle-school Sesame Street) were actually written by Tom Lehrer. Like the ‘Silent E’ song:
Given that Lehrer was a teacher by trade in his later days, it didn’t really surprise me, but it was still a bit of a ‘what the… really?!?’ moment when I first discovered that the person who had written some of the bouncy educational songs from when I was growing up was the same person who wrote ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’.
I think my favorite is “Wernher vos Braun”, “a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience”. I find many news stories remind me of that song.
“von” not “vos”
No-one has yet mentioned the still highly relevant “We Will All Go Together When We Go”. I have two of his records and still play them when the mood takes me.