Are there any other examples of mathematician/creative types besides Lewis Carroll and Tom Lehrer? That combination seems to produce something just so goddam clever.
Somebody upstream asked who sang Lehrer’s songs on That Was the Week That Was. At least some of them were by folk singer Nancy Ames. She put out a contemporary record titled This Is the Girl That Is but it didn’t contain any Lehrer songs. I’m not sure if she ever did an album with any.
Dozens. Hermann Grassmann (he of the “Grassmannian” from linear algebra class) was also a noted Sanskritist and philologist and translated the Rg-Veda.
Felix Hausdorff published essays, poems and a play under the pseudonym Paul Mongré.
The group theorist John S. Wilson is a noted composer. There are quite a few mathematician-composers who are less well known.
Mathematician-novelists include Manil Suri, Jordan Ellenberg, and Gérald Tenenbaum (also a playwright); John Mighton is a playwright as well.
I’ve always thought that Alma must have been an interesting person to attract all those geniuses.
One of my favorite random Tom Lehrer facts: he and composer Joe Raposo (who wrote most of the best-known songs from Sesame Street and The Electric Company) worked together on a Sweeney Todd musical, which was to star mustachioed comic actor Jerry Colona.
They couldn’t figure out how to make it work and eventually gave up on the project. Years later, of course, Sondheim did make the subject matter work, as Lehrer subsequently noted.
You obviously travel in different circles than me…for whom someone “less well known” than John S Wilson would mean that his mother would have difficulty picking him out of a lineup. 
“All modern women are jealous.”
- Alma Mahler, 1909
Out of respect, she should be referred to by her full name, Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel.
Just heard this now.
I’m having an emotional reaction very similar to when Jimmy Carter left us. It is a gut punch, never mind that both men attained a great age. But neither lived to see a certain evil man die, and I want to wail at unfairness of it. (Although Lehrer was here when Kissinger finally snuffed it, so there’s some bit of justice.)
I’ve toured the Gropius House near Boston. He designed it and then lived there while teaching architecture at Harvard. I asked the tour guide if Alma had lived there, too, but she and Walt had been divorced for some time before.
Introduced by my parents who had two of his albums, though I have no idea why they had them. So I’ve been a fan for a long time. Loved his stuff as a teenager, still makes me smile as an old man. I even have a copy of his songbook, Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle. As an aside, I saw Tomfoolery a few years ago in a local community theater. The actress who sang The Elements got a standing ovation.
Nitpick: That wasn’t actually how married and remarried women at the time constructed their names.
You got married, you changed your surname. Sometimes after divorce you might revert to a previous surname. But you didn’t string your previous surnames together as though they were degrees or titles you had acquired, giving you a permanent right to use them.
“The law was very firm it
Took away my permit
The worst punishment I ever endured…”
Maybe it was an easy way to keep track.
Yeah, it’s always been a useful shorthand of tabloid journalism, just not an official nomenclature convention.
“It turned out there was a reason,
Cows were out of season
And one of the hunters
Wasn’t insured!”
My grandfather worked for a NASA contractor and always talked about how he hated the Nazis coming around and telling them what they were doing wrong. I thought it was just anti-German bigotry hanging over from WWII until I heard Tom Lehrer’s song about Werner von Braun on Dr. Demeto.
Jeez Louise Elmer. Before I read your post, I had never associated “Werner von Braun” with any larger-scale version of “the Nazis coming around” in postwar US enterprises.
But now I’ve heard of Operation Paperclip, and your grandfather has my sympathy.
A couple months ago I came across a Youtube channel with some strange old Tom Lehrer Dodge commercial content. Admittedly it wasn’t his best stuff, but it was the only “new to me” content I had seen in many decades. Plus long-form, black and white, musical commercials seem so goddamn anachronistic for a guy who was a few months ago alive.
Did von Braun ever fiinish learning how to count down in Chinese?
And I especially hated that the Germans tried ti force a soace capsule without windows. Buttholes. It is awful that our government used them.