American satirist and mathematician who died on July 26th 2025, aged 97. Widely regarded as America's best modern satirist, Lehrer entered Harvard at 15 and graduated at 18. He sold roughly half a million albums in the 1950s and 1960s, and one reached No.18 on the Billboard chart. He packed out Carnegie Hall.
His songs spared nothing: nuclear war ("We Will All Go Together When We Go"), pollution, religion ("The Vatican Rag"), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week") and progressive education ("New Math"). Another favourite skewered Nikolai Lobachevsky, the "inventor" of hyperbolic geometry, whose secret was "Plagiarise!" He also set the entire periodic table to Gilbert & Sullivan.
Lehrer spent time at Los Alamos and served at the National Security Agency from 1955 to 1957 for his army service. He campaigned for George McGovern but was more universalist than of the political left. He disliked the counter-culture's grammatical sloppiness and air of moral superiority, and stopped writing songs in the mid-1960s as Vietnam grew too serious for satire.
He taught mathematics and musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz, splitting his time with Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began but never completed a PhD on the concept of the mode. In 2020 he released all his song rights to the public.
Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon.