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Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

theguardian.com

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Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#31

Post by dekhn »

bambax wrote: post #21

The article is nice and interesting but doesn't answer the question of why did Tom Lehrer stop. It's possible he thought he didn't have anything more to say. But I doubt that's the whole reason he stopped making songs and performing. He lived through a time when the US defeated Nazi Germany, and then... hired prominent Nazis to work for them. This is what the Wernher von Braun song is about. My take is, he thinks hum…

See the book "Operation Paperclip" for an in-depth writeup on the Nazi scientists who were smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war. I was not aware of, and was completely sickened by, the description of the Mittelwork factory where they worked slave laborers from nearby concentration camp to death to build V-2s.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#32

Post by pdonis »

bitwize wrote: post #25
jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

I've always thought his description of the principle behind the New Math was priceless: "In the new approach, as you know, the point is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer."

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#33

Post by I_am_uncreative »

eichin wrote: post #28
lupire wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daniel Radcliffe sang it on Graham Norton, introducing Tom Lehrer to a crowd who didn't know him. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs

Wow. (Without the piano line it's clearly a lot harder to get in the pauses to breathe, even the comically large one that's in the original performance.) Back in the 80's, the MIT freshman chemistry class had A Thing where if you'd stand up in the lecture hall and sing The Elements, you'd get extra credit (I think it was an automatic A on the first quiz? something small.) I'd already placed out, but helped one of my…

I remember singing this in my 8th grade physics class in middle school for extra credit. Circa 2007.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#34

Post by jrockway »

pdonis wrote: post #32
bitwize wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

I've always thought his description of the principle behind the New Math was priceless: "In the new approach, as you know, the point is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer."

Is that a bad thing? I don't make a lot of arithmetic errors in M-x calc or whatever.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#35

Post by pdonis »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #7

I've made a simple archive of the work Lehrer released to the public domain: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/tomlehrer-archive The text on his website suggests it won't be around for long. The archive is a git repo, you can help out by hosting it somewhere.

Just cloned it. Thanks for doing this!

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#36

Post by XMPPwocky »

bitwize wrote: post #25
jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

> Math is hard, and hard things can only be mastered through discipline.

There are certainly some things you can only learn effectively by doing them a lot. There are also other things that you've sort of got to learn by rote memorization (e.g. times tables, various formulas). I'm not aware of anything you can only learn effectively by the threat of physical violence.

For what it's worth, I was taught logic and set theory well before I learned things like long division. Somehow, it made me like math more, and I had no problems with long division either. Maybe it might have helped more if I'd been beaten though- not sure.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#39

Post by shrubble »

walterbell wrote: post #22
walterbell wrote: post #10

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", 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,…

Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), 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 ha…

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

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#40

Post by mannyv »

gjm11 wrote: post #11
mannyv wrote: post #4

“Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” Truer words have never been sung.

Those words haven't (so far as I know) been sung either: they're from one of his spoken preambles, not from any of the songs. (The preambles are generally at least as funny as the songs, at least in my estimation.)

I wouldn't call what he does singing given the normal meaning of the phrase.
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