With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer's music, and I knew he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.

The NSA's research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let's see if we can find anything he published internally! And I found a few articles I can't comment on. But there was one unclassified article-- "Gambler's Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary".

The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that's not what stuck out to me when I read it. See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources. What's the leftover?

Well, you can look through the entirety of the body of the paper. It'll take you a while, but you can pretty quickly pick up that sources 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are all cited. But if you know anything about Lehrer's musical career, you can probably figure it out by looking at the bibliography.

See, entry 3 in the bibliography is "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" by one N. Lobachevsky. And if you've ever heard Leher's song "Lobachevsky", you may have just finished that title with "Bozhe moi!"

Now, it's important to note: this paper was published internally in 1957. Tom Lehrer had recorded and released "Songs by Tom Lehrer" in 1953, with "Lobachevsky" included. The song had already achieved some success. ...but nobody at the NSA noticed when he and Fagan dropped it in as a reference.

It struck me as a very Lehrer-ish sort of prank. It's harmless, it's light-hearted, and it thumbs its nose a bit at stuffy respectability through its unfailing pretense of seriousness. How had other people reacted to the joke, I wondered?

So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort of stuff. The answer came back: "We've never heard of this before. It's news to us."

In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke. A few years later, I filed to have the paper declassified, and the NSA eventually agreed, and even put it up on their webpage: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF

Once that had happened, I wrote to Mr. Lehrer with a copy of the paper and a letter asking if he had ever gotten in trouble for it. He kindly wrote back, including a copy of the paper that had been published in Journal of SIAM in 1958, under a slightly different title. Nobody, he said, caught him.

The copy that was published as "Random Walks with Restraining Barrier as Applied to the Biased Binary Counter", of course, didn't include the Lobachevsky reference.

Tom Lehrer wasn't just a satirist or a musician. He as a comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than SIXTY YEARS for the payoff. That's dedication to craft. We lost an icon.

Holy god I had no idea he was still alive. I’m mortified. I’ve been a huge fan since I was a kid and presumed he died long before then.

I feel insane.

He just barely outlived Henry Kissinger.

A small comfort, to be sure

Thank you for aggregating the thread. I clicked through and had a hard time figuring out where to start reading and wtf was going on. I have no idea how people read in small chunks like that.

Thats pretty good, both for lifespan and fuckers to experience a world without.

3 years ago, he gifted all his songs to the world. A farewell gift for us, I should think.

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain.

[...]

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

NOTICE:

THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.

https://tomlehrersongs.com/

PS. I am rarely touched by the death of strangers, even if they entertained me. This gesture touched me as someone who has often complained about common culture being "private property". I don't begrudge any creator their money, but they need to accept that at some point, their work also belongs to the fans who made it theirs.

It's crazy, how long and far the fame of some black and white musical comedian spreads.

Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for everything.