Remembering Tom Lehrer (1928-2025)

        Celebrated as both a musician and a mathematician was Tom Lehrer (Thomas Andrew Lehrer -- 1928-2025).  Lehrer recorded pithy, humorous, and often political songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s.  Many of his songs parodied popular musical forms, often with original melodies.

         The American Mathematical Society (AMS) offers a "mostly mathematical" appreciation of Lehrer -- on YouTube, posted here by mathematician Ken Ono.   Links to many videos by Ono are available here.  

       Here is a link to one of Lehrer's mathy YouTube videos -- entitled "New Math".    In a very entertaining way, Lehrer considered this subtraction problem:  342- 173  = ??

       Below I have pasted the opening stanza for one of Lehrer's mathy poems  -- the complete poem is included in the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, an anthology of poems gathered by Sarah Gaz and me and (A. K Peters, 2008),  and is also online here.

Lehrer's complete poem (4 stanzas) is available here.

This link leads to a list of links to previous mentions of Lehrer's work in this blog.