Tom Lehrer

See http://wiw.org/~drz/tom.lehrer/

The best: During the HighTemperatureSuperconductor episode of PbsNova, to illustrate the hunt for the right chemicals to mix, they played "The Elements":

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium, And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium, <gasp> And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium, And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium, And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium, And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium, Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium. And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium, Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, <gasp for breath> And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium, And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium, And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium, And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, And there may be many others, but they haven't been discar-vard.

All of this goes to what Lehrer calls "a possibly recognizable tune", namely that of the "modern Major-General" song (from "Pirates of Penzance.") and not the admiral's song (When I Was A Lad - from "HMS Pinafore.")

"The Elements" is funny, but 'the best'? Nah. There is much more in "National Brotherhood Week" and "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie", just to mention two. --OleAndersen

"My Home Town", "Oedipus Rex", "Silent E", "The Vatican Rag", "I'm an Aardvark" and "Poisoning Pidgeons in the Park" are also the "best". But when I wrote "The best:" with a colon on the end I was introducing the best known use of a TomLehrer song on PbsNova; it's just an interjection to provide a topic break. --PCP

(And for Cod's Sake don't make clickers out of those song titles!!!)

"There once lived a man called Oedipus Rex, you may have heard about his odd complex, his name appears in Freud's index cause he LOOOOVVVED his mother." :-) --AlanFrancis

"I'm an Aardvark, fierce and free. And I'm tough and smart and strong and always right and that's the way I'm gonna be... Until I meet another Aardvark... Who's bigger than me!"

I thought I knew every song Lehrer ever wrote, but I hadn't encountered "I'm an Aardvark" before... Where does it come from? --GarethMcCaughan

SesameStreet?.

For extra credit, where did "Silent E" come from?

The Electric Company. I thought everyone knew that :-). --gjm

Hey, lads, anyone else remember "It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier" from his An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer album? -- GarryHamilton

 Ed flunked out of second grade, and never finished school
 He doesn't know a shelter-half from an entrenching tool
 But he's doing pretty well (I guess), he leads his class at OCS
 It makes a fellow proud to be a soldier!

AmericanCulturalAssumption: OCS is short for Officer's Candidate School; the route by which enlisted men/women in the US military get promoted into the officers corps; one can also become an officer by attending one of the service academies, or by battlefield promotion (fairly rare these days).

See also: ItMakesaFellowProudToBeaCoder

For a listing of many TomLehrer lyrics try http://www.lyricsdir.com/t/tom-lehrer/ or http://www.metrolyrics.com/showthis/artist/12433/Tom_Lehrer

Hey, I did my dissertation the same way Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky did his. --EricJablow

Lobachevsky did important work (all above board, as far as we know) in NonEuclidean geometry. Lehrer chose the name because it sounded nice. For those wondering what this is about, Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky" suggests that the aforementioned mathematician (long dead, and unable to defend himself) engaged in plagiarism. While the song is intended as a joke, and not a serious charge against (or criticism of) Lobackevsky, some find the use of a real mathematician in such a context to be a tad on the offensive side--especially given how seriously plagiarism is taken in academia. Of course, lots of what Lehrer wrote is offensive, which is why it's frequently so funny.

It should be noted, though, that many people (including Bolyai, Riemann if you are considering positive-curvature geometries also) seem to have independently proposed non-Euclidean geometries at about the same time. -ajb

Tom Lehrer on:

pop music: "Rock and roll and other children's records..."
the Army: "I am now in the radioactive reserve..."
Oedipus: "He sure knew who a boy's best friend is..."
The NewMath: "So simple that only a child could do it."
Also NewMath: "The idea is to know what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."
folk music: "The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people."

CategoryWhimsy

[On "whimsy"] Huh? Lehrer's classic comment on the NobelPrize in 1973 was meant seriously and is still worth thinking about seriously (as are many other things that he said or sang). ChristopherHitchens writing about the period just last year would I'm sure agree with that. Meanwhile I only learnt that Lehrer said this from Wiki a few months ago. As a naive fifteen year old something really bothered me about the whole business. As a naive forty four year old it was cool to know that help was at hand, if only I'd known where to look. -- RichardDrake

Heard the "Lobachevsky" song for the first time. Obviously wanted to know what the comments attributed to Pravda and Izvestiya were. Being Russian myself I was able to decipher one and part of the other and did an internet search to fill in the rest. Here is what it says:

Pravda: "There lived a king once and with him lived a flea". -- according to some pages where it was found, this is a line from Goethe's "Faust".

Izvestiya: "I am going where the Tzar himself goes on foot" -- This is a Russian saying meaning "to the outhouse".

-- EugeneKatz?, Saturday, December 21, 2002