Tom Lehrer was a mathematician and internationally famous musical satirist.Credit: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns via Getty
Despite being best known for his humorous and satirical songs, Tom Lehrer, who died on 26 July at the age of 97, spent most of his life as an academic mathematician. His songs, hugely popular especially in his native United States, often touched on scientific and mathematical topics, earning him many fans in the research world.
“He was really one of a kind,” says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy at the University of Oxford, UK. “I don’t think anyone has quite matched him before or since for his clever yet extremely informed mathematical and scientific lyrics.”
Lehrer’s 1951 song ‘Lobachevsky’, for instance, is a satire on the value of plagiarism for academic success, presented in the voice of a Russian mathematician who learnt the secret from Nikolai Lobachevsky, a pioneer of hyperbolic geometry. (“Plagiarize/Let no one else’s work evade your eyes”, he sang; “Only be sure always to call it research.”) The song, says du Sautoy, “was the first time I heard the name Lobachevsky, one of the great nineteenth-century geometers”.
Born in 1928 to a Jewish family in New York City, Lehrer was a prodigy who entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 15 and graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1946. He worked for a time at a company that made scientific instruments, while singing in theatres and clubs in the Boston area. He recorded an album in 1953; despite (or perhaps because of) their sometimes risqué or dark subject matter, his songs gradually acquired a cult following.
In 1955, Lehrer was drafted into the US Army, after which he was recruited to work for the US National Security Agency. In 1960, he returned to academia, teaching mathematics first at Harvard, then at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz (where he also taught a class in musical theatre). He continued to perform and tour in the late 1950s and the 1960s, becoming popular in the United Kingdom through his weekly slot supplying satirical songs for the BBC television show The Frost Report.
Such exposure made him an icon for other musical satirists and light entertainers, such as Richard Stilgoe, a regular contributor to the BBC’s Nationwide and That’s Life! “For my dad, Lehrer was a hero,” says Stilgoe’s son Jack Stilgoe, a specialist on responsible innovation at University College London.
Lehrer’s satires on science and academic life, says Stilgoe, “showed the public a world they wouldn’t otherwise see, at a time when scientists were becoming entangled in the cold war and other high-stakes issues”.
“His lyrics could be vicious,” says Stilgoe, citing in particular Lehrer’s 1965 attack on the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was brought to work for the US space programme after developing the V-2 bomb in Nazi Germany (“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical/Say rather that he’s apolitical/Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?” ). The song “is just as relevant today as we think about the products that big tech launches into the world”, says Stilgoe.
Probably the most familiar of Lehrer’s compositions to many scientists is ‘The Elements’ (1959), a virtuoso run through the chemical elements of the periodic table, set to a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance.
“One of my science teachers lent me a tape with songs of his on,” says du Sautoy. “I was a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan, so of course I fell for the elements song straight away.”
