The man who fooled the NSA – on the death of Tom Lehrer
The mathematician, songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer has died. In his later years, he put his musical work in the public domain.
Tom Lehrer performs at UCLA (1960).
(Image: gemeinfrei)
Mathematician, songwriter, and satirist Thomas Andrew “Tom” Lehrer has died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 97. In the 1950s and 1960s, he released a series of self-produced records with satirical songs and couplets. He sang about all the elements of the periodic table “Elements” or parodied the anthem of the US Marines “Send the Marines” and the rocket pope Wernher von Braun as an anti-militarist.
In addition to his performances, he wrote songs for the US version of the British TV show “That Was The Week That Was”. It was the British BBC that finally brought Lehrer his international breakthrough because many US stations refused to play sarcastic songs such as the “Vatican Rag” or the anti-nuclear war song “So Long, Mom; We Will All Go Together When We Go.”
NSA trolled
In addition to his performances as a singer and composer, Tom Lehrer worked as a mathematician at the National Security Agency (NSA). This security agency was so secret in its early days that not even its name was allowed to be mentioned. Of Lehrer's papers, which were actually still classified as secret, a single one on game theory entitled “Gambler's Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary” was published because Lehrer and his co-author referred to a Russian mathematician Lobachevsky in footnote three.
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This was a hidden reference to Lehrer's song Lobachevsky, a satirical song about plagiarism in mathematics: the mathematician Lobachevsky steals together a work that makes him very famous and is even made into a movie, with Ingmar Bergmann in the role of the hypotenuse. In later versions, Brigit Bardot or Marilyn Monroe took her place.
29th Chaos Communication Congress
In 2020, Tom Lehrer declared his songs to be in the public domain and usable for any purpose. For the 29th Chaos Communication Congress, the CCC used a verse from Lehrer's song about Wernher von Braun as the congress motto: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun.”
(mma)
