5 ms·

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-lehrman.com/insider/1997/12insiderfulltext.html http

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-lehrman.com/insider/1997/12insiderfulltext.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l... > This winter I'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra, probability, geometry, everything, so I'm trying to learn things like how perspective drawing uses infinity. So that'll take me three months. They won't appreciate it, but I will. I'll have fun with it. I've been teaching a course for non-mathematicians for years, and a lot of the stuff has already been covered there. 1997 math lecture performance (13m), including "That's Mathematics" for kids, https://archive.org/details/lehrer/lehrer_high.wmv https://archive.org/details/lehrer/lehrer_high.wmv

walterbell 2y ago
Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in 1955. TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I realized that I would have to go -- there was really no way out of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time -- especially since there was no war -- though vice president Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the same way. GEO: And what did you do? TOM LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be in special services or something playing volleyball with the troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired. GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be like creating a puzzle. TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical". GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it. https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-soldier/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...
- shrubble 2y ago
  An interesting cross reference might be to Futurama, which apparently has a lot of math majors among the writers of the show: https://cs.appstate.edu/sjg/futurama/degrees.html https://cs.appstate.edu/sjg/futurama/degrees.html
  - alickz 2y ago
    Also the writers famously created a mathematical theorem just for an episode of Futurama https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem
- mvkel 2y ago
  I always appreciate how rigorously truthful most mathematicians are.
dekhn 2y ago
I took this class (in '97 IIRC), it was called "Nature of Math". I took it because I loved his songs and wanted to take a few math classes that weren't very hard. (from a comment I made a few years ago on a previous thread: Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.)
- stogot 2y ago
  Is this class online somewhere? Did a brief search but his “new math” song is all I found
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations. What is this latter? Is it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_equation#Cardano's_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_equation#Cardano's_formu... ?
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics. Yes, that's exactly right—no solution of the general quintic in terms of radicals. This study introduced the term "soluble", and the group-theoretic version of the insolubility of the general quintic boils down to the fact that S_5 is not soluble, whereas S_2, S_3, and S_4 all are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem
EGreg 2y ago
Years ago, I recorded a series of videos to teach the fundamentals of math rigorously to beginners who may not know anything about it. One of the episodes is called “Sets and Infinity”. Lots of my friends watched it and I got a lot of positive feedback, they subscribed to the channel! It takes one hour, not three months. Check it out. https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM If you watch it — please tell me what you thought! Anything good/bad etc.

walterbell 2y ago

Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in 1955. TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I realized that I would have to go -- there was really no way out of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time -- especially since there was no war -- though vice president Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the same way. GEO: And what did you do? TOM LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be in special services or something playing volleyball with the troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired. GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be like creating a puzzle. TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical". GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it. https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-soldier/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...

shrubble 2y ago
An interesting cross reference might be to Futurama, which apparently has a lot of math majors among the writers of the show: https://cs.appstate.edu/sjg/futurama/degrees.html https://cs.appstate.edu/sjg/futurama/degrees.html
- alickz 2y ago
  Also the writers famously created a mathematical theorem just for an episode of Futurama https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem
mvkel 2y ago
I always appreciate how rigorously truthful most mathematicians are.

dekhn 2y ago

I took this class (in '97 IIRC), it was called "Nature of Math". I took it because I loved his songs and wanted to take a few math classes that weren't very hard. (from a comment I made a few years ago on a previous thread: Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.)

stogot 2y ago
Is this class online somewhere? Did a brief search but his “new math” song is all I found
JadeNB 2y ago
> It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations. What is this latter? Is it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_equation#Cardano's_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_equation#Cardano's_formu... ?
- dekhn 2y ago
  Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics. Yes, that's exactly right—no solution of the general quintic in terms of radicals. This study introduced the term "soluble", and the group-theoretic version of the insolubility of the general quintic boils down to the fact that S_5 is not soluble, whereas S_2, S_3, and S_4 all are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem

EGreg 2y ago

Years ago, I recorded a series of videos to teach the fundamentals of math rigorously to beginners who may not know anything about it. One of the episodes is called “Sets and Infinity”. Lots of my friends watched it and I got a lot of positive feedback, they subscribed to the channel! It takes one hour, not three months. Check it out. https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM If you watch it — please tell me what you thought! Anything good/bad etc.