RIP Tom Lehrer

[jack]

Used to love him. So clever and totally original. Not mainstream musicality, but incredible wit.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpv02yd2714o

[Morgan Jones]

Mind the typo! Tom Lehrer. I have his LPs. Hugely amusing. A one-man Gilbert & Sullivan. Apparently, he worked on the Manhattan Project. But that was a cover for something even more secret; he was a mathematician working on cryptoanalysis.

[shane]

While the USA produces people like Tom Lehrer, there’s still hope for mankind m.

[jack]

Mind the typo! Tom Lehrer. I have his LPs. Hugely amusing. A one-man Gilbert & Sullivan. Apparently, he worked on the Manhattan Project. But that was a cover for something even more secret; he was a mathematician working on cryptoanalysis.

He worked for the NSA during the Korean War and published a few technical papers, some still classified. His wit still shone through - in one of the declassified papers, The Gambler's Ruin with Soft Hearted Adversary (1957), there are six references (see the last page of the document) though only 5 are referenced in the paper itself. The 3rd reference, "Lobachevsky: Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiatable Remannian Manifolds", doesn't exist as a academic paper - it's a line from one of his songs from 1953 called, unsurprisingly, Lobachevsky! No-one in the NSA noticed until someone tipped them off in 2018...

[Morgan Jones]

Wonderful! Give a paper a sufficiently abstruse title and it will slip past censorship/referees. I should have played Lobachevsky to the students. There, I made a big thing of that sort of behaviour. With references, it's research and legit; without proper references, it's plagiarism and the darkest crime known to academia (if discovered). The thing I remember most is his terrible rhyming:

"These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard
And there may be many others but they haven't been discavard"

Thomas Andrew Lehrer "The Elements" (1959) (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Songs_an ... e_Elements:

[jack]

I was discussing Tom Lehrer with my brother who is a serious mathematician and he sent me this:

I thought I knew all of his songs off by heart almost, but not this one!

Bizarrely, in my original work for my PhD, way back in 1976, I wrote a paper on specific types of differentiable Riemannian manifolds - painfully difficult maths, but useful as test solutions for comparison with numerical algorithm results