Tom Lehrer
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist and mathematician, who later taught mathematics and musical theater. He recorded pithy, humorous, and often political songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. An exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.
Lehrer's early performances dealt with non-topical subjects and black humor in songs such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". In the 1960s, he produced songs about timely social and political issues, particularly for the U.S. version of the television show That Was the Week That Was. Lehrer quoted a friend's explanation: "Always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a prophet." In the early 1970s, Lehrer largely retired from public performance to devote his time to teaching mathematics and musical theater history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Early life
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York City on April 9, 1928, and grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He was the son of Morris James Lehrer, a successful necktie designer, and Anna Lehrer and older brother of Barry Waller Lehrer. Lehrer told an interviewer that he recalled an idyllic childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side that included attending Broadway shows with his family and walking through Central Park day or night. He and his family were ethnically Jewish, following a generally secular lifestyle that included attending Jewish Sunday school but also celebrating Christmas; he remarked that his ties to Judaism were "more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue and 'God' was primarily an expletive" As a child, he loved logic puzzles and math. He began taking classical piano lessons at the age of seven, but was more interested in the popular music of the age. Eventually, his mother sent him to a piano teacher who taught him how to play the Broadway show tunes he loved. At this early age, he began writing show tunes, which eventually helped him as a satirical composer and writer in his years of lecturing at Harvard University and later at other universities.Lehrer attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, part of the Bronx borough of New York. He also attended Camp Androscoggin, both as a camper and a counselor. Stephen Sondheim had Tom Lehrer as a camp counselor.
Lehrer was considered a child prodigy and skipped two grades. After graduation from Loomis School, at the age of 15 he entered Harvard College, where one of his professors was Irving Kaplansky. As an undergraduate student at Harvard, he began to write comic songs, to entertain his friends, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard".
A fellow student and friend, the physicist Jeremy Bernstein, recalled that he was told to organize a luncheon entertainment for the seniors graduating in 1951. He knew only two entertainers, Lehrer and Al Capp, both of whom agreed. Lehrer performed his songs as The Physical Revue for Harvard's physics department then and again in 1952. The revue was punningly revived by Lehrer in 1993 as Songs of the Physical Revue – a special performance for the American Physical Society to commemorate the centenary of their journal, the Physical Review.
Academic and military career
Lehrer graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics, magna cum laude, in 1946. At Harvard, he was the roommate of the Canadian theologian Robert Crouse. He received his MA degree the next year and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He later taught mathematics and other classes at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.Lehrer remained in Harvard's doctoral program for several years, taking time also for his musical career. "I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis," he once said. "But I just wanted to be a grad student, it's a wonderful life. That's what I wanted to be, and unfortunately, you can't be a Ph.D. and a grad student at the same time."
Lehrer reportedly worked briefly as a researcher with Stan Ulam at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for two months in 1952.
In 1953, he left Harvard to work for Baird-Atomic, which made scientific and industrial instruments, including radiation detection and spectroscopy.
Lehrer was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955. He served until 1957, working at the National Security Agency. Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base's ban on alcoholic beverages.
Despite holding a master's degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked high school diplomas, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of specialist third class, which he described as being a "corporal without portfolio". These experiences became fodder for songs, such as "The Wild West is Where I Want to Be" and "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier". In 2020 Lehrer publicly revealed that he had been assigned to the NSA; since the mere fact of the NSA's existence was classified at the time, Lehrer found himself in the position of implicitly using nuclear weapons work as a cover story for something more sensitive.
In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time mathematics studies at Harvard. From 1962 he taught mathematics in the political science department at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1965 he gave up on his mathematics dissertation on modes in statistics, after working on it intermittently for 15 years.
Lehrer grew tired of shoveling snow in the harsh Cambridge winters and already knew he liked California's Bay Area. He contacted botany professor Kenneth V. Thimann, provost of Crown College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and suggested teaching courses in musical theater. Since Crown was science-oriented, Thimann asked mathematician Anthony Joseph Tromba, who had been at Harvard and knew of Lehrer's musical antics, to find him a position at humanities-heavy Cowell College instead. Tromba sold Lehrer to the Fellowship Committee: "No one on the committee had heard of Tom. So I had to convince them that it was a great idea... We had Ph.D.s in music and art history who did scholarly work. But Cowell also wanted to have practicing artists to give students actual meaningful contact with them. Rather than just writing papers about Michelangelo, let's have Michelangelo here—and why not?" So in 1972, Lehrer joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tromba said that Lehrer was officially a "Lecturer in American Studies," not mathematics, though he taught two introductory classes, "The Nature of Mathematics" and "Mathematics in the Social Sciences," to liberal arts majors—"Math for Tenors", according to Lehrer. He occasionally performed songs in his lectures.
In 2001, Lehrer taught his last mathematics class, on the topic of infinity, and retired from academia. He remained in the area, maintaining homes in both Santa Cruz and Cambridge. In 2003 Lehrer confirmed he still "h out" around UCSC. Mike Peña of UCSC said in 2025, "Lehrer's reputation matched UC Santa Cruz's creative and irreverent spirit; and his talents played perfectly into the campus's original intent to elevate the humanities and foster deeper connections between scholarship and society... Lehrer taught at UC Santa Cruz until 2001 and last came here about five years ago. His cultural contributions are so woven into the American fabric that they ensure his place as one of the most beloved educators ever to teach at our campus."
Musical career
Style and influences
Lehrer was mainly influenced by musical theater. According to Gerald Nachman's book Seriously Funny, the Broadway musical Let's Face It! made an early and lasting impression on him. Lehrer's style consists of parodying various forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs led him to write "The Elements", which lists the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song".In author and Boston University professor Isaac Asimov's second autobiographical volume, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recounted seeing Lehrer perform in a Boston nightclub on October 9, 1954. Lehrer sang a song about Jim getting it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, "... and after a while you gathered the 'it' was venereal disease. Suddenly, as the combinations grew more grotesque, you realized he was satirizing every known perversion without using a single naughty phrase. It was clearly unsingable outside a nightclub." Asimov also recalled a song that dealt with the Boston subway system, making use of the stations leading into town from Harvard, observing that the local subject-matter rendered the song useless for general distribution. Lehrer subsequently granted Asimov permission to print the lyrics to "The Subway Song" in his book. "I haven't gone to nightclubs often," said Asimov, "but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time."
Recordings
Lehrer was encouraged by the success of his performances, so he paid $15 to record in a single one-hour session on January 22, 1953, at the TransRadio studio on Boylston Street in Boston, Songs by Tom Lehrer. The initial pressing was 400 copies. Radio stations would not air his songs because of his controversial subjects, so he sold the album on campus at Harvard for $3,, while "several stores near the Harvard campus sold it for $3.50, taking only a minimal markup as a kind of community service. Newsstands on campus sold it for the same price." After one summer, he started to receive mail orders from all parts of the country, as far away as San Francisco, after the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article on the record. Interest in his recordings spread by word of mouth. People played their records for friends, who then also wanted a copy. Lehrer recalled, "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."The album included the macabre "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", the mildly risqué "Be Prepared", and "Lobachevsky", regarding plagiarizing mathematicians. It became a cult success by word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion. The limited distribution of the album led to a knock-off album by Jack "Enjal" being released in 1958 without Lehrer's approval, where some of the lyrics were mistranscribed.
Lehrer embarked on a series of concert tours and recorded a second album in 1959. He released the second album in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was a studio recording and An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert. In 2013, Lehrer recalled the studio session for "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", which referred to the practice of controlling pigeons in Boston with strychnine-treated corn: