#tom-lehrer — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tom-lehrer, aggregated by home.social.
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Operation Overcast was certainly underway by July 1945, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to bring into the US 350 German scientists, including #WernerVonBraun and his V2 rocket team, chemical weapons designers, and artillery and submarine engineers.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/24/a-picayune-detail-nazi-science-heads-west/
Soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbioLyrics
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wernher-von-braun.pdf -
On April 9, 1928: #TomLehrer, American musician ("The Elements"), satirist (That Was The Week That Was), and mathematician, born in New York City (d. 2025).
#HappyBirthday #RIP 💔🕊️ -
@nicheinterests
My dad had this album, which I played over and over as a kidProbably explains a lot
#TomLehrer -
I've done a deep dive into the history of musical comedy and the novelty single, and begin the program this month with this crown jewel from the genre's late grand master, #TomLehrer's 1959 #PoisoningPigeonsInThePark. (No animals were harmed in the making of this video.)
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How did I not know about this song until just this minute? Je présente une chanson de Tom Lehrer récemment découverte. (I present a newly discovered song by Tom Lehrer.) #Music #Song #Comedy #Culture #Entertainment #France #TomLehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gjxz-7bBbo&list=RD8gjxz-7bBbo&start_radio=1
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“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. / In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: / Plagiarize!”*…
Georg Cantor and Richard DedekindIn an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. But as Joseph Howlett reports, a trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism…
When Demian Goos followed Karin Richter into her office on March 12 of last year, the first thing he noticed was the bust. It sat atop a tall pedestal in the corner of the room, depicting a bald, elderly gentleman with a stoic countenance. Goos saw no trace of the anxious, lonely man who had obsessed him for over a year.
Instead, this was Georg Cantor as history saw him. An intellectual giant: steadfast, strong-willed, determined to bring about a mathematical revolution over the clamorous objections of his peers.
It was here, at the University of Halle in Germany, that Cantor launched his revolution 150 years ago. Here, in 1874, he published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. That paper crystallized a concept that had long been viewed as a mathematical malignancy to be shunned at all costs: infinity. It forced mathematicians to question some of their longest-held assumptions, rocking mathematics to its very foundations. And it gave rise to a new field of study that would eventually bring about a rewriting of the entire subject.
Now Goos, a 35-year-old mathematician and journalist, had come to Halle — a five-hour train ride from his home in Mainz — to look at some letters from Cantor’s estate. He’d seen a scan of one and was pretty sure he knew what the others would say. But he wanted to see them in person.
Richter — who, like Cantor, had spent her entire career here, first as a research mathematician and then, after retiring, as a lecturer on the history of mathematics — gestured for Goos to sit. She lifted a thin blue binder from the scattered piles of books and papers on her desk. Inside were dozens of plastic sheet protectors, each one containing an old, handwritten letter.
Goos began flipping through, contemplating the letters with the relish of an archaeologist entering a long-lost tomb. Then he reached a particular page and froze. He struggled to catch his breath.
It wasn’t the handwriting. At this point in his research on Cantor, he’d become accustomed to the strange, nearly indecipherable Gothic script known as kurrentschrift, which Germans used until around 1900.
It wasn’t the signature. He knew that the German mathematician Richard Dedekind had been a key player in Cantor’s quest to understand infinity and solidify math’s foundations, and that the two had exchanged many letters.
It was the date: November 30, 1873.
He’d never seen this letter before. No one had. It was believed to be lost, destroyed in the tumult of World War II or perhaps by Cantor himself.
This was the letter that had the power to rewrite Cantor’s legacy. The letter that proved once and for all that Cantor’s famous 1874 paper, the one that would go on to reshape all of mathematics, had been an act of plagiarism…
The extraordinary story of unearthing this extraordinary story: “The Man Who Stole Infinity,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?“
* Tom Lehrer (not just a glorious songwriter, but also a gifted mathematician), “Lobachevsky” (referring to the mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky— “not intended as a slur on [Lobachevsky’s] character [but chosen]”solely for prosodic reasons”)
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As we confer credit where credit is due, we might spare a thought for Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin; he died on this date in 1962. A Belgian mathematician, he is best known for proving the prime number theorem (which formalized the intuitive idea that primes become less common as they become larger by precisely quantifying the rate at which this occurs). So great was the contribution that the King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.
#Cantor #culture #DemianGoos #GeorgCantor #history #infinity #KarinRichter #Mathematics #primeNumberTheorem #primeNumbers #RichardDedekind #Science #TomLehrer #ValléePoussin #ValleePoussin -
@AccordionBruce @pteryx @Da_Gut
Yeah he turned it into something unique for sure, but he was at the right place at the right time as media/tech shifted and became more ubiquitous etc.
But the other thing is that he never was parodying the song as much as the ideas behind the song it was it's always been a social commentary rather than a roast of an artist
#TomLehrer was of course no slouch
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#HanukkahNight1 This year for #Hanukkah I'm celebrating another artist who passed away earlier this year. This one's for you, #TomLehrer https://youtu.be/LslsgH3-UFU?si=PQCARqS3NtlzfEqT
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#Heute 21Uhr auf der #Wuestewelle eine Stunde Lieder für eine besser Welt!
Thema in der roten Note ist #Weihnachten : ohne biederen Mief dafür mit #Kapitalismuskritik und Gedanken an den Menschen, denen nicht zu feiern zu Mute istSchaltet auf 96,6mgh in #Tübingen #Reutlingen #Rottenburg oder streamt auf https://www.wueste-welle.de/Mediathek.html
#musik #radio #rotenote #antikapitalismus #kommunismus #frieden #renaud #kreisler #poppys #tucholsky #tomlehrer #esbrennt #tannenbaum #coluche #resto #vahle #podcast
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Now I have this looping in my head.
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Okay, I will make one exception to the no carols before Thanksgiving: #TomLehrer #TomLehrerAChristmasCarol #LateStageCaptailism #TheTrueSpiritOfAmericanChristmas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtZR3lJobjw
RE: https://indieweb.social/users/chadkoh/statuses/115602389642202971 -
Parks are great for poisoning pigeons, but anywhere will do, really.
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Growing up, the three R's were reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. Not any more.
While #reading and #writing are incredibly useful, #arithmetic isn't quite as essential when I have a calculator in my pocket. #Mathematics, on the other hand, is necessary for lots of things, as #TomLehrer demonstrates: https://youtu.be/2VZbWJIndlQ?si=PiSJBwgv7mUCGU7m
In this millennium, the three R's are #reload, #restart, and #reinstall. And, when you contact #support, they will walk you through them first.
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And here's another one! This comes from an even older version of the program, from 1986. It's old enough that it doesn't take into account the speed of the PC, so the self-contained executable is useless even on an emulated 486! Fortunately the .mus (custom music file format) file is included, so I had to use the version of PIANOMAN from 1988 to first convert it to the newer .muz file format, then convert that to an executable. Was it worth it? You be the judge. Another #TomLehrer classic.
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In the late 1980's there was an MS-DOS program called PIANOMAN. Yup, in the docs, it's written in all caps like that. This program would let you compose, play, edit, and save tunes, and even compile them into self-contained executables to give to others who didn't have a copy of PIANOMAN themselves. This program's claim to fame was that it could create pseudo-polyphonic music through the monophonic PC speaker by playing different notes extremely rapidly. This was a shareware program (try it for a while, if you like it, send in a registration fee to get the latest version and another disk of sample songs). I just found the shareware distribution of version 4 on Archive.org. One of the included tunes, which exists here only as a compiled, self-contained executable, is a version of a Tom Lehrer classic. Naturally, I figured some folks might be interested in this. It's set up to play repeatedly until a key is pressed, so I've only included three playings in this recording, and the last one fades out. Enjoy! #TomLehrer
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Hi everyone - I’m a #TomLehrer posting bot!
Tom Lehrer was a singer-songwriter satirist who was primarily active during the 1950s and 1960's - and that is where the bulk of my materials arise from.I have a database of ~160 Tom Lehrer lyrics (broken up in to bite sized bits) and ~40 quips and quotes from his albums, which will be posted twice per week.
More quotes, trivia, lyrics, and other relevant material can be added over time - and hopefully will!
Submissions, requests, feedback, questions? Send them in via DM or direct @ message.
I really need to stress this part: avoid this account if you are readily offended 🙈 .
Avatar from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Tom_Lehrer_in_c._1957.jpg
Header is the bottom half of the album cover “Tom Lehrer Revisited”.
