He was 97, so one can hardly object to his innings being over, but it is very sad. I don’t have anything to add, but one must write something.
Tom Lehrer was great, of course, and famously was trained as a mathematician. I never met Lehrer, although he was a very good friend of Bob Osserman, one of my (great) supervisory guys at Stanford. Osserman and Lehrer were students together at Harvard and they remained lifelong friends; Lehrer gave a rare, later years performance, at Osserman’s 80th birthday party, which would have been in 2006. (There used to be available a clunky video of the performance but it seems to have disappeared.) Osserman once told me that he had a cassette with an unrecorded maths song by Lehrer. Lehrer, however, was apparently very nervous about bootlegs, and I never got to borrow the cassette. Damn.
Lehrer’s great mathematical song, of course, was Lobachevsky:
Then, there was the excellent New Math:
And, there were a few minor mathematical songs:
His best songs, however, were political, of which the best was undoubtedly Wernher Von Braun:
That’s it. No clever words. Just a sad good bye to a great comedian.
Quite. I class Tom Lehrer with Flanders and Swann for wit, intelligence, and sheer delight. Some of his rhymes are genius. In Lehrer’s honour I’ve been out poisoning pigeons in the park…
(And in case you think of Flanders and Swann as examples of British whimsy and light humour, listen to their song “20 Tons of TNT”.)
Thanks, Marty, for your elegant tribute to Tom Lehrer.
I had never heard, or heard of, “20 tons”. That is a great song.
The greatest who ever got chalk on his coat!
Send the Marines
My father introduced me to the joy of Tom Lehrer. He used to play his Lehrer cassettes in the car on trips. He had the good fortune of seeing him perform in Melbourne!
As you say, it’s not to be unexpected at 97, but I found myself very saddened by the news of Lehrer’s death.
👌👌👌