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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?

#161

Post by andrepd »

bitwize wrote: post #158
andrepd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing how this comment is diametrically opposed to the truth :) It's in fact the very contrary! "Drilling maths" into kids is how you get everyone except the most pre-disposed to "hate maths" with a passion. Because they grow up thinking mathematics is deathly boring busy work of repeating the same busy-work ad nauseum. Teaching rote memorization is useless and wastes time that could better be used exploring ideas…

I can guarantee you that Lockhart drilled in the basic arithmetic problems until he knew his times tables and such by heart. He couldn't do things like algebra without this fundamental knowledge ingrained into the fiber of his being. You can't play a Chopin sonata, at least not smoothly and beautifully, without having played lots of boring scales and finger exercises. And you can't get to the fun, creative, beautiful…

You can't do abstract algebra without doing 847848161×6413045539 in pen and paper hundreds of times before? That's a new one!

> fundamental knowledge ingrained into the fiber of his being

I agree! That knowledge being: mathematical reasoning, logic, capacity for abstraction, rigour... and NOT doing stupid mindless work over and over again until you can recite multiplication tables by heart. Sorry, that's accounting, not mathematics.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#162

Post by andrepd »

vundercind wrote: post #150
andrepd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing how this comment is diametrically opposed to the truth :) It's in fact the very contrary! "Drilling maths" into kids is how you get everyone except the most pre-disposed to "hate maths" with a passion. Because they grow up thinking mathematics is deathly boring busy work of repeating the same busy-work ad nauseum. Teaching rote memorization is useless and wastes time that could better be used exploring ideas…

I am deeply suspicious of this POV because in my actual experience it was precisely when we shifted from “apply this thing” to something more like real math that classmates started to give up on math entirely. They may not have liked it before, but that didn’t mean they were bad at it. The anger and resentment and resistance to math came later, when we were past arithmetic and drilling (which were also by far the mos…

You seem to be extrapolating from very incomplete data. Maybe if you had a better mathematical education you wouldn't? :) /s

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#163

Post by JadeNB »

dekhn wrote: post #29
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,…

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 terti…

> 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_formu... ?

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#164

Post by dekhn »

JadeNB wrote: post #163
dekhn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 terti…

> 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_formu... ?

Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#165

Post by JadeNB »

dekhn wrote: post #164
JadeNB wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_formu... ?

Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics.

> 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

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#166

Post by space_oddity »

bitwize wrote: post #23
space_oddity wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw that video back then my jaw dropped.Was fascinated by it

Radcliffe's geek cred was a factor in his casting as the title character in Weird:The Al Yankovic Story .

Wanted to watch this one for a looong time

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#167

Post by noneeeed »

ska wrote: post #153
noneeeed wrote: post #132

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious. The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at someth…

> While they don't have the science/maths background that makes Lehrer an obvious win for the HN crowd, True, but they did one on thermodynamics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs

I'd forgotten about that one, absolute classic.
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