Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is an American satirist, songwriter, and mathematician whose three studio albums of the 1950s and 1960s made him one of the best-known musical satirists in the English-speaking world, despite an unusually short performing career. He was born Thomas Andrew Lehrer on April 9, 1928, in Manhattan, New York, into a secular Jewish family. He entered Harvard at age 15 and earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1946 and his master's the following year.

He began writing comic songs as a Harvard undergraduate, and he recorded his first album Songs by Tom Lehrer in 1953 in a Boston studio for self-release. He pressed 400 copies and sold them by mail order to friends and acquaintances; the record eventually sold over 350,000 copies through that informal distribution. His 1959 album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

His 1965 album That Was the Year That Was collected songs he had written for the American version of the British satirical television program That Was the Week That Was, including "The Vatican Rag," "Pollution," "Wernher von Braun," and "The Elements" — the last a recitation of all then-known chemical elements set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General." After 1967 he largely stopped performing publicly, returning only for occasional appearances and for songs written for the 1970s children's program The Electric Company.

He taught mathematics and musical-theatre courses at Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he settled in 1972 and where he remained a lecturer until 2001. In October 2020 he placed all of his lyrics and recordings into the public domain, asking only that the act be acknowledged. His three short-recorded albums have remained continuously in print and in circulation for more than six decades.

His name Tom is a short form of Thomas, from the Aramaic T'oma meaning "twin." It has been one of the most-common English-speaking boys' names for centuries, and Lehrer carried it through one of the most-influential short careers in American musical satire.