Tom Lehrer: Satirist, Mathematician, Inventor Of The Jello Shot

Obituary The field of satirists and hit singer-songwriters who were also professional mathematicians and lecturers is a very small one, and as such, we feel sure Tom Lehrer was the greatest who ever lived… And he also invented the modern Jell-O shot.

Thomas Andrew Lehrer, who died on July 26 aged 97, was born in New York City on April 9, 1928, to a secular Jewish family. He was a mathematical prodigy who entered Harvard at the tender age of 15. His application letter was written in verse and entitled “Dissertation on Education”. It ended:

It worked. Three years later, he got his first degree in mathematics, a BA magna cum laude, in 1946 at the age of 18. In a 1984 interview, he said, “Everyone in college was young then, because… everyone who was not young was in the army.”

Interested in music from an early age, he took piano classes from the age of seven, but was more interested in the popular music of the 1930s: jazz, ragtime, and show tunes. At Harvard, one of his tutors was the late Irving Kaplansky, who was also a keen amateur musician. Lehrer attended Camp Androscoggin as a child and later returned as a camp counsellor, where he worked with a young Stephen Sondheim.

Lehrer was most known to the world as a composer and performer of satirical music. As an undergraduate, he performed his own songs for his fellow students, including at a 1952 concert called The Physical Revue. (The name is a pun on the academic journal The Physical Review.) The great American SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin was reportedly at one of these shows and said it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

Only one of these songs (but a favorite of hers) later became part of his repertoire: Fight Fiercely, Harvard [PDF]. Encouraged by their reception, in 1953, he self-produced an album, Songs by Tom Lehrer. He had 400 copies pressed, but by mid-1950s standards, it became a viral hit: it sold 10,000 copies in the first year.

Lehrer had a remarkable eye for rhyme and rhythm, and for its time, his material was highly subversive. His song Lobachevsky [PDF] was named for the great Russian mathematician, and intentionally uses cod-Russian syntax. Today, it could stand as an anthem for the users of generative “AI”:

The song then goes on to describe how all of his work on his first paper, “on Analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds,” is stolen. Lehrer’s choice was not entirely random; in his lifetime, Lobachevsky was accused of plagiarism for his pioneering work in non-Euclidean geometry.

In 1955, Lehrer was drafted into the US Army. He was seconded to the then-classified National Security Agency. While working there, in 1957 he internally published a paper, The Gambler’s Ruin with Soft-Hearted Adversary [PDF]. The Bibliography section at the end offers just six references, but only five are cited in the paper. The other? “Lobachevsky: Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian [sic] Manifolds (Unpublished).” Our appreciation and gratitude for this delightful revelation goes to a Bluesky user known only as “Opalescent Opal,” who worked for the NSA much later, got the paper declassified and published in 2018, and wrote to Lehrer to confirm the joke, which had remained hidden for nearly 60 years.

During this time, he went to a Christmas party, but alcoholic drinks were forbidden, so he had the idea of making spirit-laced jelly desserts. He told the SF Weekly:

Lehrer’s international reputation rose when Princess Margaret (the late Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister) mentioned her fondness for his music when accepting an honorary degree from the University of London in 1957. This did get him some UK radio airplay – but not much, as the BBC promptly banned most of his records.

In his brief touring and performing career, he only recorded 37 songs, some for the American version of That Was The Week That Was. He disliked performing on stage live, protesting during one famous live performance:

He stopped making satirical records after the 1960s, saying, “When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died.” He also commented that “things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.” He did, however, come out of recording retirement to record several songs for a US children’s educational TV show called The Electric Company.

His verse was remarkable, making effortless rhymes such as:

In We Will All Go Together When We Go [PDF], as he called it an “uplifting song in the tradition of the great old revival hymns” about humanity dying in nuclear war. Or, in a joyous song about the joys of spring, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:

This, apparently, was a favorite of at least some of the British Royal Family:

The Times of Israel obituary has many more of his unlikely couplets.

Other classics include the sadomasochistic dance number The Masochism Tango, the romantic ballad of a murderer I Hold Your Hand In Mine [PDF]. He even set the periodic table to the melody of The Major-General’s Song by Gilbert and Sullivan to create The Elements [PDF], ending in the couplet:

After retiring from touring, he used some of the income from record sales to pay for studying for a PhD, but abandoned it in 1965, saying he had nothing original to offer academia. He continued to teach into his seventies, alternating between Harvard and Santa Cruz, escaping the Massachusetts winters in California, where he taught both mathematics and musical theatre. He is widely reported as having been less than impressed whenever students mentioned his music, saying that they should not expect his teaching to be funny.

He remained active and engaged even later in his life. Rapper Tauheed K. Epps, who records as “2 Chainz”, sampled Lehrer’s song The Old Dope Peddler [PDF] for his track Dope Peddler, asking permission to use a snippet. Lehrer wrote back:

We linked to his lyrics, although they are slightly inconveniently PDF files, because in 2020, he placed all of his lyrics in the public domain. A couple of years later, he did the same with all his original melodies, ending the disclaimer on tomlehrersongs.com:

His songs even contain lessons relevant for today’s AI makers, racing to build and quick release a whole new category of software to the public without much regard for consequence. As he sang in “Wernher von Braun”:

There has never been a songwriter like Lehrer, and we hope that the outburst of affection from his fanbase that has resulted from his death, combined with his renunciation of his rights, might result in covers, translations, adaptations and other things that bring his material to fresh ears. By total coincidence, the Reg FOSS desk was quoting his lyrics to friends on the day he died.

It is appropriate, we feel, that his surname, “lehrer”, is the German word for “teacher”. He took more pleasure from his work in education than from his work in music, with the exception of his educational songs for children. We cannot do better than ending our tribute to him with his own words:

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