[HN Gopher] Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
___________________________________________________________________
Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
Author : f_allwein
Score : 249 points
Date : 2024-05-22 11:44 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I saw "Tomfoolery," a Lehrer revue, in 1980 or 1981 in SF. The
| actor singing "The Elements" had a periodic table and a pointer.
| He identified every element in time and at tempo without missing
| a one. Impressive.
| f_allwein wrote:
| Check out https://tomlehrersongs.com/albums/ - he put all his
| works into public domain.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Yes, indeed. Bookmarked that a while ago!
| lupire wrote:
| 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
| space_oddity wrote:
| When I saw that video back then my jaw dropped.Was fascinated
| by it
| bitwize wrote:
| Radcliffe's geek cred was a factor in his casting as the
| title character in _Weird:The Al Yankovic Story_.
| sp332 wrote:
| He said it was this specific performance that convinced
| Weird Al that he was the right guy. Also the movie is
| great.
| eichin wrote:
| 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 housemates practice, which
| was fun (he did succeed, on the day.)
| I_am_uncreative wrote:
| I remember singing this in my 8th grade physics class in
| middle school for extra credit. Circa 2007.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I acknowledge the effort but this didn't quite land for me.
| Don't know the performer or the tv show; the lava lamp
| background was distracting.
| Symbiote wrote:
| He was Harry Potter in all the films, so I assume he's one
| of the best-known actors in the world.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I've not seen the movies or read the books.
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| ...username checks out?
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Can't spell "Ok, boomer" without "me".
| rkangel wrote:
| Some years ago I did a production of Gilbert and Sullivan (I
| think Ruddigore - I've done a few). We had a talent night, and
| one of the guys did "The Elements" at full tempo while also
| solving a Rubiks cube and had it done before the end of the
| song.
|
| It put all the rest of our "talents" to shame!
| mannyv wrote:
| "Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what
| you put into it."
|
| Truer words have never been sung.
| gjm11 wrote:
| 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.)
| walterbell wrote:
| From https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-
| we-g...
| mannyv wrote:
| I wouldn't call what he does singing given the normal meaning
| of the phrase.
| walterbell wrote:
| mini-musical?
| gjm11 wrote:
| That seems unfair. He is (or at least was when he was doing
| it -- he's 96 years old now) a very competent singer and
| pianist. He's not particularly trying to make a beautiful
| sound, but there's more to singing than _that_.
| mannyv wrote:
| Even he has said that calling what he was doing 'singing'
| would be generous.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Well, yes, self-deprecating humour is a thing, but
| there's a difference between Tom Lehrer pretending he
| can't really sing and someone else claiming he can't
| really sing.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Tom Lehrer is one of my musical heroes, and I listen to his songs
| regularly to this day. My hat's off to you, Mr. Lehrer.
|
| Having known a couple of very famous people and seeing what that
| brought to them, I'd prefer obscurity. I don't know if that's
| related to his decision-making, of course.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| Just cloned it. Thanks for doing this!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778749 - Dec 2023 (2
| comments)
|
| _That 's Mathematics - Tom Lehrer Songs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471908 - Nov 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer puts all music and lyrics in public domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34038206 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy 's Mysterious Genius_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034896 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public
| domain_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024968 - Dec
| 2022 (130 comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509279 - March 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer - So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III, 1967)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496103 - Feb 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer on Kurt Weill 's Broadway Music (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27743713 - July 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer Puts His Music into the Public Domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882384 - Oct 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683 - Oct 2020 (132
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer 's Mathematical Songs (1951)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279151 - Aug 2020 (44
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer's memorable "Revue" session_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036813 - Sept 2018 (6
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608 - April 2018 (83
| comments)
|
| _Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy 's Mysterious Genius_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684409 - Dec 2015 (3
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675682 -
| Dec 2015 (32 comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer 's last (math) class (2001)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914399 - Nov 2010 (1
| comment)
| walterbell wrote:
| 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,
| probability, geometry, everything, so I'm trying to learn things
| like how perspective drawing uses infinity. So that'll take me
| three months. They won't appreciate it, but I will. I'll have fun
| with it. I've been teaching a course for non-mathematicians for
| years, and a lot of the stuff has already been covered there._
|
| 1997 math lecture performance (13m), including "That's
| Mathematics" for kids,
| https://archive.org/details/lehrer/lehrer_high.wmv
| walterbell wrote:
| 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 have to go -- there was really no way out
| of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't
| really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and
| then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it
| "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I
| allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there
| were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten
| deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was
| a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my
| "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I
| did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time --
| especially since there was no war -- though vice president
| Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So
| there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few
| other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't
| look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be
| safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the
| same way. GEO: And what did you do? TOM
| LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I
| asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be
| in special services or something playing volleyball with the
| troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy
| job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that
| they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired.
| GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician
| influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be
| like creating a puzzle. TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics
| itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen
| Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in
| college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for
| organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all
| those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which
| is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all
| that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical".
| GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant
| discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire
| to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if
| anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but
| that's about it.
|
| https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...
| shrubble wrote:
| 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
| alickz wrote:
| Also the writers famously created a mathematical theorem
| just for an episode of Futurama
|
| https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem
| mvkel wrote:
| I always appreciate how rigorously truthful most
| mathematicians are.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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 tertiary
| equations.)
| stogot wrote:
| Is this class online somewhere? Did a brief search but his
| "new math" song is all I found
| EGreg wrote:
| Years ago, I recorded a series of videos to teach the
| fundamentals of math rigorously to beginners who may not know
| anything about it.
|
| One of the episodes is called "Sets and Infinity". Lots of my
| friends watched it and I got a lot of positive feedback, they
| subscribed to the channel! It takes one hour, not three months.
| Check it out.
|
| https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM
|
| If you watch it -- please tell me what you thought! Anything
| good/bad etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| Although, as the article notes, he did glancingly dip his toe
| back in a couple of times but my impression was that he was just
| ready close that chapter. Even requests from close friends fell
| on deaf ears.
| doktrin wrote:
| I can't pretend to know the man's mind but I always got the vibe
| he didn't really feel at home in the cultural landscape of the
| late 60s and onwards
|
| Personally I think his contributions would be welcome in any era,
| and either way "this is the year that was" is a certified banger
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I grew up listening to him.
|
| He seems to be personally, very happy.
|
| That's something that I find inspirational.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I have to think "swapping fame for obscurity" is a large part
| of that happiness.
|
| "Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn't Want to Talk to You",
| brilliant.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Lehrer has often expressed that he didn't enjoy the lifestyle
| that came with fame
| jrockway wrote:
| 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 have to say that I only
| ever use bitmasks. chmod 755 foobar)
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 proficiency is
| drilling. Drill the basic math facts and standard algorithms
| until the kid knows them by heart and can do problems as easily
| as breathing. Only then will they be ready for the higher
| level, conceptual stuff.
|
| The Soviets were ahead in math and science because they drilled
| their kids harder. Any kid who didn't want to drill was a
| traitor to the working class. (Were I a right-wing conspiracy
| theorist, I'd say New Math and its successors were Soviet
| psyops designed to sabotage math education in order to weaken
| the west. Instead I think it's more likely a psyop by the
| bourgeoisie to make us more compliant and exploitable slaves
| through mass innumeracy.)
|
| No surprise, then, that today, when Americans really want their
| kids to learn math, they use the curriculum from a country
| where they cane you for minor infractions. They use Singapore
| Math. Math is hard, and hard things can only be mastered
| through discipline.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think I'm too old for common core (39). It was "Chicago
| Math" or something like that. We did multiplication by making
| a 2x2 grid with diagonal lines and whatnot? I didn't really
| understand the simplification that much; my parents taught me
| the old way well before I encountered this in school.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| To be fair, New Math is a perfect intro to graduate-level*
| maths; it's just a poor fit for people who (because they
| don't have calculators? or even slide rules?) would like
| their children's maths courses to cover arithmetic.
|
| (I had a geometry teacher who had been excited because his
| daughter wanted him to sign something saying she'd be allowed
| to take "Sets Education". Imagine, finally sets being
| introduced at the Jr High level! ... and then he realised
| he'd misheard: there was an "x" at the end of the first word)
|
| Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-
| couldn39t-be-a-math-...
|
| * or undergraduate discrete maths, of the sort you'd want for
| any halfway decent CS programme. I'm _glad_ I got a cheap
| 'n'cheerful intro to lattices in 5th grade.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| New math was actually pretty successful at the lower
| grades. The issue was that when it came to rolling it out
| to middle and high schools, they just kind of said "here's
| the textbook, figure it out" instead of going through a
| coordinated process of teaching the teachers while helping
| them develop their new curricula (which they did for
| elementary school).
|
| So you had this really ugly failure of teachers not really
| necessarily being prepared to teach the material combined
| with the rush to roll out the curriculum across the board
| instead of expanding it year by year so there wouldn't be a
| sudden change in expected education.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I have a theory that the enthusiasm of teachers teaching
| the material is a far bigger factor in the effectiveness
| of learning than the methods. So much so that any
| advantage from better methods gets quickly nullified
| without teacher buy in
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I have an anecdotal theory that most people who came
| prepared to a STEM programme in the States last century
| did so despite, not due to, the modal 7-12 teaching. (if
| true, I hope it no longer is?)
| bluGill wrote:
| Most teachers in the states did poorly in math, and never
| loved it. They in turn can't pass a love of math on. They
| are good enough at math to pass the tests, but that isn't
| why they are teaching.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That's why the US can get stuck in such educational ruts.
| There are too many teachers who don't have the in-depth
| understanding to alter their teaching methods to
| approaches other than the one they memorized in education
| college.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Every single teacher I remember as being influential on
| me in any significant was was hugely enthusiastic for
| their subject and the material. No matter how hard or
| easy the class was, that enthusiasm was definitely the
| biggest contributing factor to how much of an impact they
| had on me. One of the only classes I ever really
| struggled with was a government / civics class. The
| teacher assigned difficult work and graded hard. But they
| were enthusiastic, firmly convinced that the key to
| understanding US government and politics was
| understanding the sides and arguments in the major
| landmark Supreme Court cases. So convinced of this were
| they, that many classes were spent with them
| enthusiastically recreating oral arguments for various
| cases. Presenting both halves of them as if they were the
| lawyers, and leaving us to ask questions about the
| positions and the arguments.
|
| To this day, that enthusiasm for those cases, for
| understanding both how each side of these cases is both
| convinced they're in the right and how often the cases
| pivot on very narrow aspects of the law has carried over
| for me decades later. Those lessons and the insights have
| shaped not only my passing interests in law and politics,
| but how I approach day to day conflict and debate.
|
| If they had been unenthusiastic and dry, like so many
| other teachers I'd had, theirs would have been just
| another boring US history class with a jerk of a
| "difficult" teacher.
| pdonis wrote:
| 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. "
| jrockway wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? I don't make a lot of arithmetic
| errors in M-x calc or whatever.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Is that a bad thing?_
|
| It's a bad thing if you never learn how to actually get
| the right answer. Which unfortunately seemed to be a
| common consequence of the New Math as a teaching method.
| andrepd wrote:
| Why? The objective is understanding, not getting the
| rightsl answer, because you will never do a long
| multiplication in your life since a 3$ chip does it in a
| tenth of a microsecond
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm probably not going to multiply two 5 digit numbers
| together on paper much less do long division but I
| certainly do smaller scale mental arithmetic all the
| time.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The objective is understanding, not getting the
| rightsl answer_
|
| I would argue that if your "understanding" doesn't
| actually enable you to get the right answer, you don't
| really understand.
|
| _> you will never do a long multiplication in your life
| since a 3$ chip does it in a tenth of a microsecond_
|
| And how do you know the chip's answers are accurate?
|
| Or what if you want to _design_ the chip?
|
| Or what if there's an EMP and all of the chips are fried?
|
| More generally, if you're satisfied with just some
| conceptual-level "understanding" of _anything_ that doesn
| 't actually enable you to tell right answers from wrong,
| you are setting yourself up to be manipulated, misled,
| conned, etc. Critical thinking is a valuable life skill,
| and it requires you to be able to tell right from wrong
| answers.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| > 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.
| woooooo wrote:
| You really don't think so? Personally, threats of physical
| violence are very persuasive. Yeah I'll memorize that
| multiplication table.
| 7402 wrote:
| I was in elementary school in the early 1960s. We had New
| Math. We learned set theory and how to do arithmetic in any
| base from 2 to 10.
|
| It was fun for a budding math geek. However I kept failing
| miserably at the tests of memorization of the multiplication
| table. I knew how to add, so I didn't see the point of
| memorizing something that I could simply derive by repeated
| addition.
| petsormeat wrote:
| I have lingering bitterness for the irresponsible New Math
| experiment in my elementary education. I couldn't tell time
| on an analog clock until I was 12, thanks to the blithe
| dismissal of "rote" multiplication tasks.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Just out of interest and if it's not too personal, what's
| your age/generation? I'm in my mid twenties and I don't
| have any peers that couldn't more or less always read
| analog clocks as far as they remember.
|
| edit: I just googled it and apparently New Math was during
| the 1950s-1970s. This confuses me even further since
| reading an analog clock seems even more important in those
| times?
| ghaff wrote:
| I certainly learned New Math in the sixties. And neither
| myself nor anyone else I knew had any trouble with analog
| clocks which is most of what existed.
| contrast wrote:
| I'm fascinated - I've never thought of reading the time as
| a maths skill. How does it depend on learning
| multiplication?
|
| (non-American here, I may be lacking context that makes it
| obvious)
| Angostura wrote:
| I guess the 5 times table for counting minutes?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It doesn't; multiplication isn't involved at all.
|
| The only skill required is remembering that the shorter
| hand is hours and the longer hand is minutes.
|
| https://images.thdstatic.com/productImages/f220d887-1a05-
| 418...
| vundercind wrote:
| Of course it's involved!
|
| Hour 6 is also minute 30. There's some arithmetic for
| you! Six times five, if you like, or six times ten
| divided by two if you prefer.
|
| Many don't have numbers at all, so you'll need to build a
| good intuition for fractions and converting those to
| hours and minutes if you want to read them fast. Most of
| us do it so automatically we don't notice, but some of
| that's plausibly fraction multiplication.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, the usual case, where the minutes aren't printed on
| the clock itself, is that you've memorized the positions
| of :00, :15, :30, and :45, and you report the time by
| reference to that.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Are you involved with studying pedagogy as it relates to math
| at a graduate level? If so, where and how long ago?
| coryrc wrote:
| > Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education
| since, up to and including Common Core
|
| Have you actually looked into it? I was skeptical too, but
| then I saw they were trying to teach kids the way I do math.
| For example, what's 4001 - 3989. The old way would be to
| borrow and carry three times. But change question to
| 1+4000-3990+1 and the answer is perfectly simple. Kids I went
| to school with would literally write out 43-39 with 13-9 and
| 3-3. Maybe they're just dumb, but you don't have to be a whiz
| to use these techniques if someone shows you them.
|
| I hope they're still doing some times table memorization.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The easy ways work for easy problems. But the harder ways
| work for all problems. I've used a lot of that shortcut
| math before it was allowed in class. I probably would have
| been better off just doing it the regular way, especially
| so I wouldn't get points off for not showing my work or
| showing the wrong work.
| MrJohz wrote:
| At least in the UK, where we also learned these sorts of
| arithmetic tricks, we still learned the "harder ways".
| The point of these techniques wasn't to replace long
| multiplication or something, but more as shortcuts so we
| didn't have to do it if we didn't need to, and we could
| simplify problems if we saw a better way to do them.
|
| We also practiced this stuff regularly, and had mental
| maths quizzes at least once a week. And (at least when we
| weren't learning a specific technique), it didn't matter
| how we did the calculations, so if you felt more
| comfortable with the traditional methods, you could do
| that, you were usually just slower. (I was one of those
| slower people very often!)
|
| The point isn't to go "here's how you do maths, it's
| always like this". It's about (a) helping you do
| arithmetic more quickly, and (b) helping you understand
| why numbers behave the way they do, in terms of bases and
| pairs and factors and other things like that.
| andrepd wrote:
| They don't have to _" work"_ as in "be an efficient pen
| and paper algorithm", because the far more efficient
| algorithms is "use a computer"! They have to be _good to
| build understanding and intuition_ , and e.g. presenting
| subtraction as "distance on the real line" is an
| excellent way to do this.
|
| I did not expect this short-sighted way to look at maths
| education here in this website.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Implementation is terrible though. The only explanation I
| have for the _terrible_ tests given at my kids ' schools is
| that they are to test the teachers not the students.
|
| For example, the curriculum indicates a teacher must teach
| 4 strategies for multiplication. Totally reasonable. But
| then the test will have questions like "Perform this
| multiplication using strategy _foo_ " which seems like
| putting the cart before the horse. Isn't the whole point of
| teaching multiple strategies is so that at least one
| sticks?
|
| [edit]
|
| And no, they aren't doing times (nor even addition)
| memorization in school. We did them at home and the
| benefits were absurd.
| vundercind wrote:
| > Have you actually looked into it?
|
| I've had three kids go through the early grades with it. I
| was on the fence at first. It turned out to be awful. The
| kids hate it. We hate it. There's weird unhelpful bullshit
| vocabulary everywhere ("let's use 'number sentence' in
| kindergarten before we've taught kids what a regular
| sentence is, _that'll_ surely help!"). Solving the same
| problem five ways which is infuriating to a kid who "gets
| it" already and has been very harmful to their opinion of
| school in general. Their deeper mathematical understanding
| doesn't seem to be any more advanced than mine was in
| elementary school, which was supposed to be the point, and
| we're having to supplement the "bad" stuff like
| multiplication tables so they're not lacking the very most
| important math skills in every day life and needed to make
| actual progress on wrapping one's head around even simple
| stuff like, say, algebra involving fractions.
|
| Terrible, way worse than even my more-pessimistic guesses
| would have been.
| cyberax wrote:
| > The Soviets were ahead in math and science because they
| drilled their kids harder. Any kid who didn't want to drill
| was a traitor to the working class.
|
| That was not how the Soviet schools worked. There was no
| corporal punishment, and struggling students were given help.
|
| Instead, it was quite competitive. There was a system of
| academic competitions ("Olympiads") that went all the way up
| from schools to the international level. Students were
| encouraged to compete.
|
| At the same time, school sports competitions were pretty much
| absent.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| One thing that struck me as very different in classroom
| scenes is that we* were always to avoid giving each other
| help, but I get the impression soviets were supposed to aid
| each other.
|
| Punchline 1: (little Johnny sent to the principal after
| making a comment about physical attributes of the teacher
| instead of Pushkin's next line, says to the visiting
| teacher evaluators) "Next time, sirs, when you don't know,
| don't prompt!"
|
| Punchline 2: (a former maths prof turned shipbuilder,
| trying to coast, read literature, and earn some extra cash
| in "maths for the proletariat" evening school, is stuck at
| the brownboard having calculated a negative circumference
| of a circle = -2pr; his classmate helps) "Psst, colleague,
| swap order of integration!"
|
| Lagniappe:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogwWGEO1-c&t=10574s
|
| * I distinctly remember being taught the "right" way to
| raise hands in 4th grade, and in particular placing one's
| elbow on the desk and putting a forearm perpendicular to it
| was "wrong". Imagine my surprise upon discovering, many
| decades later, that they for sure didn't want us somehow
| (despite the iron curtain -- as if we'd had had a clue
| anyway) copying soviet classroom protocol.
| Angostura wrote:
| Counterpoint: I was bought up before new math and completely
| bewildered by maths at school. As far as I could tell it was
| just a set of magical and arbitrary operations that I had to
| learn by heart, with no inkling as to what was going on.
| There was nothing there I could _understand_ no framework my
| brain could hang things on and I completely failed.
|
| New math sounds like it would have been idea for me.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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 and concepts and abstractions and all that makes
| mathematics beautiful.
|
| I recommend reading "A Mathematician's Lament" https://maa.or
| g/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLame...
| vundercind wrote:
| 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 most useful parts of our
| primary and secondary school math education, in actual
| life, for most people)
|
| [edit] my suspicion is because it's both entirely contrary
| to my experience, and always seems to come from people who
| like math so much that they majored in it and started to
| really _love_ it right around the time the folks I'm
| thinking of above--a far larger set--have decided not just
| that they dislike math, but that they can't do it and also
| that hardly matters because it seems to be pointless.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 bits of mathematics without having
| drilled in the fundamentals. Not unless you're Gauss or
| somebody.
| harry8 wrote:
| Octal is essential in x86 assembly encodings. They make little
| sense in hex.
|
| https://gist.github.com/seanjensengrey/f971c20d05d4d0efc0781...
| randycupertino wrote:
| I love his Harvard fight song. So genteel! Impress them with
| your prowess, do. Hurl that spheroid down the field!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU
|
| He nails the Boston Brahmin accent so perfectly lol.
|
| And of course the elements song is a total banger.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2cfju6GTNs
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > And of course the elements song is a total banger.
|
| That's an odd one to mention; he has nothing to do with its
| musical qualities. He didn't compose it.
| arcticfox wrote:
| But he did an excellent job of pairing the elements to the
| song.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Is that what we're appreciating when we call the song a
| "banger"? Most people _who like the song_ don 't know the
| words.
| zoky wrote:
| Yeah, well, I _do_ know the words, and I can confirm that
| it's a banger.
|
| Antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium...
|
| Of course, I only know the lyrics due to the fact that I
| am the very model of a modern major-general...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Getting 80% of the first line of the song isn't the
| strongest possible evidence that you know the words.
|
| But regardless, how much do you think you'd enjoy
| listening to the words absent the music?
|
| Tom Lehrer has plenty of clever wordplay going on, of
| various types in different songs. _When You Are Old And
| Gray_ has a fun example of wording for the sake of
| wording.
|
| But I don't think wording is a strength of _The
| Elements_.
| 123894893 wrote:
| The song "New Math" is actually funny to listen to, I think
| most people don't pay attention to what's happening in it. In
| the first verse, he's mocking the idea of teaching kids the
| concept of borrowing, as if it's a bizarre and confusing
| concept that almost no one would understand. He was completely
| wrong, of course, and it's the way almost everyone - at least
| in the U.S. - does subtraction now.
|
| The "right" way that he presents at the beginning of the song
| is a way that I've never encountered anyone doing. It's
| actually fairly interesting:
|
| > Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put
| up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do
| that...Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you're
| under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three
| is six but if you're over 35 and went to a public school you
| say eight from four is six, and carry the one, and we have 169.
|
| "Three from 2 is 9, carry the one"; it seems to be a completely
| algorithmic way of doing the calculation, where you end up with
| the right answer at the end, but it's completely detached from
| what's actually happening. Tom Lehrer - a math teacher, it
| should be noted - was mocking the idea of teaching people what
| was actually happening with subtraction. We see a similar thing
| today, where people mock the idea of teaching math concepts
| with Common Core because they think people should just use an
| algorithm to get the answer, even if they don't understand
| what's happening.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| Wait is he actually criticizing it in this song? I always
| thought that he was mocking people who _didn 't_ understand
| borrowing by sounding disbelieving about it, when it's in
| fact obvious how & why it works
| 123894893 wrote:
| Yes, he's mocking the idea of teaching borrowing. He gives
| the way he thinks subtraction should be taught in the
| intro. It's a way that, as far as I can tell, hasn't been
| taught in America in over half a century. After the intro,
| he goes on to mock the concept of borrowing, which was
| (apparently) part of New Math. Then in the final verse he
| mocks the idea of teaching bases.
|
| Here's a good animated version of the song that shows the
| different methods. You'll notice that the "silly" New Math
| method is the way that makes sense to Americans today, and
| the "simple" method preferred by Lehrer is very confusing
| for anyone who's not used to it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
|
| Here's more of the intro which makes it clear what's going
| on. My explanations in brackets:
|
| > Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been
| put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your
| child's arithmetic homework because of the current
| revolution in mathematics teaching known as the "New Math".
|
| > So as a public service here tonight, I thought I would
| offer a brief lesson in the New Math. Tonight, we're gonna
| cover subtraction.
|
| [ New Math is confusing, and he's going to go over how
| confusing it is in a humorous way.]
|
| > Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will
| put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do
| that...
|
| > Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you're
| under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from
| three is six but if you're over 35 and went to a public
| school you say eight from four is six, and carry the one,
| and we have 169.
|
| [This is how it was done before the confusing New Math, the
| "right" way to do it. "Three from two is nine, carry the
| one."]
|
| > But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing
| is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the
| right answer. Here's how they do it now...
|
| [The New Math approach is silly because it's so focused on
| trying to teach kids concepts that it leaves them unable to
| do basic arithmetic.]
|
| After this comes the first verse, which is designed to make
| the idea of "borrowing" sound so overly complex that few
| people would be able to understand it.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| The "right" way to make borrowing complex is to teach it
| as a special case of cocycles in group cohomology:
| http://timothychow.net/mathstuff/jdolan.pdf
| andrepd wrote:
| Which is doubly stupid given that teaching algorithms for
| arithmetic is a useless skill and has been for 40 years.
|
| Just focus on the ideas, maths is beautiful, pen and paper
| accounting is not.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The "right" way that he presents at the beginning of the
| song is a way that I've never encountered anyone doing. It's
| actually fairly interesting:
|
| > "Three from 2 is 9, carry the one"; it seems to be a
| completely algorithmic way of doing the calculation, where
| you end up with the right answer at the end, but it's
| completely detached from what's actually happening.
|
| I can't understand what you're trying to say. The only
| difference in the patter is whether you carry the one before
| or after you subtract 3 from 2. "Both" approaches have you do
| the same thing in the same way. What's the contrast?
| OskarS wrote:
| Yeah, ultimately it's the same algorithm, it's just a
| question of what are the details of the procedure, which
| makes it confusing if you've learned one way and not the
| other. The whole point of the song is that Lehrer thinks
| this is a new, less good way of doing subtraction.
|
| Look at this video if you haven't already:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
|
| The first way he does it seems INCREDIBLY confusing to
| people who learned arithmetic in the last 30 or so years
| (the sentence "8 from 4 is 6" is nonsensical to most such
| people), but the "modern" way he's mocking is perfectly
| understandable.
|
| I think the song is very funny and charming, but I do think
| this is a rare case where Lehrer is just wrong, the
| "borrowing" style is a much better and clearer way to
| explain subtraction. It is just as fast, and it gives you a
| much better intuition about what's actually happening,
| instead of just learning the steps by rote.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the sentence "8 from 4 is 6" is nonsensical to most
| such people
|
| Anyone who understands "7 from 3 is 6" must necessarily
| also understand "8 from 4 is 6". Nobody learns how to
| subtract from numbers that have digits of 3 without
| simultaneously learning how to subtract from numbers that
| have digits of 4.
|
| > I do think this is a rare case where Lehrer is just
| wrong, the "borrowing" style is a much better and clearer
| way to explain subtraction. It is just as fast, and it
| gives you a much better intuition about what's actually
| happening, instead of just learning the steps by rote.
|
| But I already pointed out that the steps _aren 't
| different_. They're the same style. Whether you use the
| term "carry" or "borrow" makes no difference to anyone.
| OskarS wrote:
| > But I already pointed out that the steps aren't
| different. They're the same style. Whether you use the
| term "carry" or "borrow" makes no difference to anyone.
|
| Obviously, it does. Like, that's what the song is about.
| You're not just disagreeing with the other commenters,
| you're disagreeing with the concept of the song itself.
|
| It's a different way of doing it, even if the underlying
| principle is the same. This stuff matters a lot in
| pedagogy, even if there's no difference in the underlying
| mathematics. I could say this: "you subtract two decimal
| numbers a_n a_n-1 ... a_1 and b_n b_n-1 ... b1 by
| successively calculating c_n = a_n - b_n - K_n-1 if a_n
| >= b_n, where K_n is the carry from the nth digit, or c_n
| = a_n - b_n + 10 - K_n-1 if a_n < b_n, and you set K_n to
| 1" or whatever. That's the same method, but it's a
| TERRIBLE way to teach a child how to do subtraction.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's not that there's no difference in the underlying
| mathematics. That would be true, by necessity, of any
| subtraction strategy that worked.
|
| There's no difference in the steps being performed. If
| you go through each approach, you'll notice that you do
| the same things in the same order, with the possible
| exception that carries might appear before or after the
| actual subtraction with which they are associated. All of
| your intermediate calculations are the same. Everything
| you write down is the same in both cases. Someone
| presented with your worked solution would have no way to
| determine whether you had "old math" or "new math" in
| mind as you worked it. Someone who _watched you solve the
| problem_ would also have no way to determine that,
| because there is literally no difference in the method.
|
| The "new math" part of the problem isn't that you do the
| base-10 subtraction differently. It's that you're
| expected to be able to do the same subtraction in base 8
| too.
| 123894893 wrote:
| > The "new math" part of the problem isn't that you do
| the base-10 subtraction differently. It's that you're
| expected to be able to do the same subtraction in base 8
| too.
|
| That's the second verse. The entire first verse is
| mocking the "New Math" idea of borrowing, showing New
| Math subtraction in base 10.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Borrowing isn't even a New Math idea. Here's an American
| Old Math mathematics textbook from 1931: https://archive.
| org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509299/page/n2...
|
| Beyond the intriguing assumption that an adult man might
| purchase this book, a manual of basic arithmetic, for the
| purpose of self-improvement, it's pretty much
| indistinguishable from what we have today. This is the
| treatment of subtraction:
|
| > If any figure [digit] in the subtrahend is a number
| greater than the one above it in the minuend, it cannot
| be subtracted directly and the following method is used.
| A single unit (1) is "borrowed" from the next figure to
| the left in the minuend and written (or imagined to be
| written) before the figure which is too small. The figure
| of the subtrahend is then subtracted from the number so
| formed and the remainder figure written down in the usual
| way.
|
| > The minuend figure from which the 1 was borrowed is now
| considered as a new figure, 1 less than the original, and
| its corresponding subtrahend figure subtracted in the
| usual way. If the minuend figure is again too small, the
| process just described is repeated.
|
| > As an illustration of the procedure just described, let
| it be required to subtract 26543 from 49825. The
| operation is written out as follows:
| 71 Minuend: 49/25 [the 8 is struck through;
| I don't know how to type this] Subtrahend: 26543
| ------- Remainder: 23282
|
| > Here the subtrahend figure 4 is subtracted from 12
| instead of the original 2, and the subtrahend figure 5 is
| then subtracted from 7 instead of the original 8.
|
| (pp. 10-11)
|
| What do you believe were the New Math revisions to this?
| There weren't any; what made it New Math was insisting
| that people _be familiar_ with the theoretical background
| that the textbooks had always provided. The algorithm,
| and the explanation of it, were not changed in any way.
|
| (Older textbooks do use the "8 from 4 is 6" model
| instead, where carries are done into the subtrahend
| instead of being taken from the minuend, and they have a
| different explanation. They still provide that
| explanation for those students who care to know, which is
| very few people.)
| 123894893 wrote:
| > Borrowing isn't even a New Math idea.
|
| Borrowing and base 8 weren't created by New Math.
| Teaching them to students, at least according to the
| song, was part of New Math. Lehrer specifically says
| this. In the intro he gives the way it was taught ("Now,
| remember how we used to do that...Three from two is nine,
| carry the one"), then he says "But in the new approach,
| as you know, the important thing is to understand what
| you're doing rather than to get the right answer. Here's
| how they do it now...", then he immediately shows the
| borrowing approach, which is followed by the chorus
| "Hooray for New Math!" After showing "how they do it
| now", he then goes on to show the same problem in base 8
| for the second verse (followed by a repetition of the
| chorus, and then the song ends).
|
| I get that you don't think the approaches are different,
| or that they're tied to New Math. Lehrer and his audience
| did, which is the entire point of the song.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Borrowing and base 8 weren't created by New Math.
| Teaching them to students, at least according to the
| song, was part of New Math. Lehrer specifically says
| this.
|
| No, he doesn't.
|
| So first, we can observe with our own eyes that borrowing
| and carrying are the same thing, with only the label
| being changed.
|
| But we can also observe that what was taught to students,
| as reflected in their textbooks, is the same thing that
| was taught under the label New Math and the same thing
| that is still taught today. Go ahead and look at the
| textbook.
|
| The part that is specific to the New Math is the
| conversion of the problem to base 8. If you want to stick
| closely to the lyrics of the song, you might notice that
| they specify that the base-8 subtraction is the _only_
| problem posed by the New Math textbook; the base-10
| version is something that Tom Lehrer provides to the
| audience to aid their understanding of the base-8
| version.
|
| This isn't just the clear message of the song, it's also
| what you'll learn if you read retrospective or
| contemporaneous coverage of New Math. You can see
| discussion in precisely these terms on the rather
| perfunctory Wikipedia page.1 But most importantly, you
| might notice that working in alternative bases is
| actually new, in that - unlike the working of the base-10
| problem in the first verse of the song - it doesn't
| appear in textbooks written a hundred years before the
| New Math was developed.2
|
| The joke in the first verse is just that it's hard to
| follow a rapid patter. One specific joke in that verse is
| the set of lines "And you know why four plus minus one
| plus ten is fourteen minus one, 'cause addition is
| commutative. Right." Again, there's nothing new about
| this material, it's just that the explanation is
| superfluous to the process and paced in a manner that
| makes it hard to follow.
|
| 1 Admittedly, the page's view of what was salient in New
| Math is pretty likely to have been influenced by Tom
| Lehrer's song, but that's still a radically different and
| more plausible interpretation of the song than what
| you're pushing for.
|
| 2 That far back, it's all carrying into the subtrahend,
| but the approach of "here's an example showing each step
| of the process in detail, accompanied by a theoretical
| discussion of why it works" is already present. To get
| carrying out of the minuend, you need to go to just
| decades before the development of New Math, as the patter
| notes.
| 123894893 wrote:
| The whole point of the song is that Lehrer thinks that
| teaching it as borrowing is so different that it makes it
| incomprehensible to people.
|
| > But I already pointed out that the steps aren't
| different.
|
| They are, with borrowing you make the change to the tens
| place first, "getting" the extra ten ones, then
| explicitly add it to the ones place, then do the
| subtraction.
|
| With the old way (Lehrer's preferred method), you don't
| even look at the tens place, and you do - something. I'm
| still not sure what they were actually doing with "3 from
| 2 is 9, carry the one." You could mentally change the 2
| to a 12 and subtract three (which would be closer to
| borrowing, though the steps are out of order), but the
| fact he doesn't say 12 and says 3 from 2 makes me wonder
| if this wasn't the case. Because you could also take the
| tens complement of the number being subtracted and add it
| to the number you're subtracting from. Or simply memorize
| a subtraction table, the same way people memorize a
| multiplication table.
|
| He mentions two ways people are taught to do the next
| step - the first is that after "carrying the one," you
| subtract it from the number in the 10's place. This
| basically creates a situation where subtraction is the
| same as addition - if you have extra with addition, you
| carry the one and add it. If you have an extra with
| subtraction, you carry the one and subtract it. The other
| way is carrying the one to the number you're taking away
| and adding it to it. So 4 - 7 in the tens place becomes 4
| - 8 when you "carry the one."
|
| [I'm using tens and ones place for clarity, it could also
| be the hundreds and tens place, the thousands and
| hundreds place, etc.]
|
| So there are certainly differences. These might not seem
| like big differences to you, but they're big enough that
| Lehrer, and apparently others, felt that people couldn't
| understand it when one was used rather than the other.
| You see the same thing when Common Core approaches come
| up - it might be fundamentally the same thing, but the
| changes in the steps that you take can throw people off.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'm still not sure what they were actually doing with
| "3 from 2 is 9, carry the one." You could mentally change
| the 2 to a 12 and subtract three
|
| > you could also take the tens complement of the number
| being subtracted and add it to the number you're
| subtracting from
|
| > Or simply memorize a subtraction table, the same way
| people memorize a multiplication table
|
| Well, you can't take the ten's complement of the number
| being subtracted, because it's infinitely large. One
| obvious difference between subtracting 3 and adding
| ...99999999999999999999999999999997 is that it's possible
| to write "3".
|
| You definitely _can_ memorize a subtraction table, and
| that 's the approach being taken in all cases you've
| mentioned so far. Including the new math approach;
| indexing your table entry under "12" and "3" is not a
| different approach from indexing the same entry under "2"
| and "3". As with "borrowing" versus "carrying", it is a
| purely cosmetic difference, where you have the same
| literal object with a slightly different name.
|
| That's the reason the textbook wants you to do the same
| problem in a different numerical base; the author is
| making an attempt to force the student to solve the
| problem from first principles instead of relying on a
| memorized algorithm. This doesn't work unless the student
| cares about the material. But note that the author
| recognizes, as you seem not to, that regardless of how
| much theoretical background you provide for why the
| subtraction algorithm works, the student won't pay any
| attention to it unless they have to. And the algorithm
| itself hasn't changed - what's changed is the inclusion
| of the followup problem "same numbers, base 8".
|
| Tom Lehrer implies that this approach to pedagogy is
| misguided; under the old system, students learned to
| produce correct solutions to subtraction problems and
| didn't know why their approach worked, whereas under the
| new system, we asked tricky questions that successfully
| revealed that the students didn't know why the approach
| they were being taught worked, and therefore couldn't
| apply it to problems of the kind that never come up. He
| is correct that this is pointless; we already knew that
| the students didn't know why the math worked.
|
| > These might not seem like big differences to you, but
| they're big enough that Lehrer, and apparently others,
| felt that people couldn't understand it when one was used
| rather than the other.
|
| As I just said, Lehrer knew that people couldn't
| understand it either way. The contrast is between
| "getting the right answer" and "understanding what you're
| doing"; there is no implication that people who learned
| the old approach understood what they were doing. But
| they got better marks than the new math students, because
| they weren't graded on whether they understood.
|
| I am aware of one other contemporary record of societal
| struggles with "new math"; it came up a fair amount in
| Peanuts. The only example given was the problem "write
| the 'new math' sentence for 'three is less than five'",
| and the correct answer was "3 < 5".
| 123894893 wrote:
| > Well, you can't take the ten's complement of the number
| being subtracted, because it's infinitely large. One
| obvious difference between subtracting 3 and adding
| ...99999999999999999999999999999997 is that it's possible
| to write "3".
|
| The ten's compliment of 3 is 7.
|
| > Including the new math approach; indexing your table
| entry under "12" and "3" is not a different approach from
| indexing the same entry under "2" and "3".
|
| 12 - 3 = 9 is quite different from 2 - 3 = 9 carry the
| one. The latter requires a separate explanation for
| what's actually happening.
|
| > But they got better marks than the new math students,
| because they weren't graded on whether they understood.
|
| People seem to do subtraction just fine with borrowing,
| and I've never heard anyone claim that the old method is
| superior outside of Lehrers song.
|
| > As I just said, Lehrer knew that people couldn't
| understand it either way.
|
| This is clearly false, though. Most people today
| understand borrowing just fine, while (at least according
| to Lehrer's song) people who studied the old approach had
| so little understanding of what was happening that they
| couldn't even grasp the concept of borrowing. If you look
| at what's actually being said, all of the stuff in the
| first verse that Lehrer is presenting as mindlessly
| complex for adults is completely intuitive to anyone with
| a decent grasp of modern elementary school math:
|
| "You can't take three from two Two is less than three So
| you look at the four in the tens place Now that's really
| four tens So you make it three tens Regroup, and you
| change a ten to ten ones And you add 'em to the two and
| get twelve And you take away three, that's nine Is that
| clear?"
|
| The sarcastic "is that clear?" is there to show how
| confusing this is. But it's actually quite clear for
| people with a modern education. The problem is 342 - 173.
| You don't do 2 - 3 ("You can't take three from two, Two
| is less than three"), so you borrow a ten from the 40,
| changing it to a 30 and the 2 to a 12 ("So you look at
| the four in the tens place, Now that's really four tens,
| So you make it three tens, Regroup, and you change a ten
| to ten ones, And you add 'em to the two and get twelve").
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The ten's compliment of 3 is 7.
|
| Not a good look for someone extolling the benefits of
| understanding the theory behind an algorithm. This is
| only true if you're working modulo 10.
|
| I'm suddenly very curious what you think the ten's
| complement of 12 is.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Maybe they used "borrow" in the "new" method to avoid
| having both 2-3=9 and 2-3=-1, compared to explicit
| radix+2-3. But if you actually wanted to memorize
| subtraction table then "old" way is maybe easier, because
| your table is nice square grid instead of wider triangle
| (and if you actually need negative result you can do
| second lookup for 10-x).
|
| Also try doing something like 2000-1111 in "new" method
| and you go on huge side quest to propagate the borrows
| and go back to the beginning. Compared to "old" method
| where you progress one digit at a time without
| backtracking.
| kloop wrote:
| > I think the song is very funny and charming, but I do
| think this is a rare case where Lehrer is just wrong, the
| "borrowing" style is a much better and clearer way to
| explain subtraction.
|
| How much of that is that you're familiar with this method
| (the same way Tom was familiar with the old method)?
| OskarS wrote:
| It's a good question, I'm not sure. I do think it's
| clearer what's going on, and the steps are more obvious.
| Like, there's a joke in the song about what to do with
| the carry, if you add it to subtrahend digit or remove it
| from the minuend digit ("if you're over 35 and went to
| public school...") which to me indicates that it's rather
| arbitrary and "learn algorithm by rote". Like, the
| "borrowing" thing just much better describes what is
| actually happening, rather than having to memorize a
| subtraction table and then have arbitrary rules about how
| to proceed with the carry.
|
| But who knows, I wasn't taught the other system, maybe
| it's equally obvious. I do think it's indicative that the
| "borrowing" system is nowadays much more common (that's
| how I learned it in Sweden in the 90s), which probably
| indicates that it does have some pedagogic value. I don't
| think for a second either way is "more efficient" than
| the other: once you get the hang of the borrowing system,
| you do it very fast.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The other system, as described in 19th-century textbooks,
| says this:
|
| ----
|
| [What if the digit in the subtrahend is bigger than the
| one in the minuend?]
|
| Imagine adding 10 to both numbers. Obviously, the
| difference between them will not be changed.
|
| But adding 10 to the digit in the subtrahend is the same
| as adding 1 to the digit immediately to its left.
|
| So, add 10 to the [current] digit in the minuend, add 1
| to the [next] digit in the subtrahend, and then perform
| the subtraction.
| t-3 wrote:
| The only thing I found strange about it was that he started
| from the least significant digits rather than the most. It's
| basically the way I've always done subtraction, just
| backwards.
| chmod775 wrote:
| If you do it the other way around you may have to backtrack
| if subtracting a less significant digit from another worked
| out to <0. You will also have to be careful about
| alignment, since in one number you start from the first
| digit, but in the other you may start from the middle. It's
| slightly more complicated than just starting from the least
| significant digit.
| chmod775 wrote:
| As someone who learned the "right" way in German public
| school about 20 years ago, the statement "teaching people
| what was actually happening with subtraction" is completely
| indecipherable to me. Maybe I never learned what subtraction
| is. To me it's like advocating for not using a ruler because
| that would somehow forego teaching people what measuring
| actually means.
|
| Both "measure" and "subtract" can mean doing any number of
| things in mathematics, depending on what you're dealing with.
| Intuition for things in the physical world specifically
| shouldn't be a goal of teaching mathematics at school. It's a
| prerequisite. If a child already can't grasp the concept of
| taking away from something, throwing mathematics and numbers
| at them is not going to help one bit.
| TheFreim wrote:
| "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)" by Tom Lehrer is one of
| my favorites.
| elihu wrote:
| I didn't know he had released sheet music and lyrics into the
| public domain. That's amazing.
|
| https://tomlehrersongs.com/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Fun fact: the tempo for "Smut" is "Pornissimo" in the sheet
| music.
| elihu wrote:
| I would expect nothing less.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I would be content with less, namely _pornior_.
| cyco130 wrote:
| "I Got It from Agnes" is the funniest song ever written and I
| will refuse to socialize with anyone who thinks otherwise after
| hearing it. What a brilliant mind.
| bambax wrote:
| 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 humanity as a whole doesn't deserve him --
| which may very well be the case.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I vaguely remember seeing that part of the reason he quit was
| that he felt satire had no purpose and no possibility of
| success in a country which elected Richard Nixon. Which may
| have been sort of brilliantly prescient of him, considering how
| popular stuff like The Daily Show / The Colbert Report was in
| the 2000s and yet how toothless and impotent they seem in the
| face of current political developments.
| bambax wrote:
| The article does address this:
|
| > _we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He
| quoted approvingly Peter Cook's sarcastic remark about the
| Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the
| rise of Hitler and the second world war._
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _He could just about stay detached enough to be funny about
| Eisenhower's America._
|
| compare "Our Long National Nightmare":
| https://legacy.npr.org/assets/news/2013/onion-bush.pdf
| cess11 wrote:
| What do you mean by "the US defeated Nazi Germany"?
|
| As I understand it the US was preoccupied with Japan until the
| USSR had Berlin within reach. US racial policy being an
| inspiration for european fascists, like Hitler, kind of makes
| the affiliation with nazis both in the US and West Germany (and
| NATO) easier to understand than the USSR keeping some nazis in
| important positions on their side.
| davidgay wrote:
| This is just ridiculous, esp. re Berlin. I'd suggest starting
| with reading about D-day at the very least.
| cess11 wrote:
| June 1944, something like 1.5 years after the turning point
| in Stalingrad on the eastern front.
|
| So, what about it? Why don't you bring up the invasion of
| Sicily instead?
| jedberg wrote:
| TL;DR: He didn't answer the question.
|
| Still a fun read though.
| ribs wrote:
| Holy crap, Tom Lehrer is still alive!?
| lproven wrote:
| Yes he is, and he is with it enough to know about the internet
| and publishing rights and so on.
|
| So, a few years ago, he put all his lyrics in the public
| domain, and then more recently, all his original melodies too.
|
| Top man.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Artie Shaw was another guy who walked away from fame, and he was
| a lot bigger than Tom Lehrer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw
|
| Gerry Rafferty (probably more _commercially_ successful than
| Lehrer, at least) also didn 't like the business or performing
| aspects of music.
|
| Bill Murray said (paraphrasing), "I always say to someone who
| wants to be rich and famous, 'try being rich first, and see if
| that doesn't get you 90% of what you want.' Being famous is a
| 24-hour-a-day job."
| vmfunction wrote:
| >Being famous is a 24-hour-a-day job.
|
| That's why, people whom are smart and/or lazy won't touch it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Bill Withers hated working with the record labels so much he
| walked away from Columbia and quit touring, though he had about
| a dozen years from when he won his first Grammy to walking
| away. He attributed his ability to walk away to being older
| than most (early 30s) when his first hit was released.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| evil Dark Enlightenment mathematician Eric Weinstein posted a
| photo on Twitter of himself and Tom Lehrer, with a blurb about
| how arranging the photo with his son was a great highlight of his
| life. I can't find it anymore, he must have taken it down.
|
| edit: found a copy:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeTFuNkUQAAHIwa?format=jpg
|
| He posts a lot about Tom Lehrer!
|
| https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40ericrweinstein%20lehr...
|
| Here's Tyler Cohen claiming Tom Lehrer would have been a part of
| the "Intellectual Dark Web"
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/to...
| kragen wrote:
| eric weinstein is not from the dark enlightenment (the
| neoreactionaries who want to re-establish monarchy) but the
| intellectual dark web ('a term used to describe some
| commentators who oppose identity politics, political
| correctness, and cancel culture'). i know the culture war can
| be confusing, and it's hard to keep all the subversive factions
| straight
| emmelaich wrote:
| What a fantastic quote..
|
| > _You had to admire these folk singers," he says on the live LP.
| "It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student
| auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is
| against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on."_
|
| It's pretty much my reaction to every protest or social concern
| story in the media.
| vintermann wrote:
| Part of the joke is that lots of people are against peace and
| justice and brotherhood in practice - often the majority.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| I like that it is ambiguous. Something for everybody.
| p3rls wrote:
| Yeah when I gaze out into the sea of salty and stultified faces
| at these protests "what brave souls" is what runs through my
| head too, if only the state wasn't so finnicky about creating
| martyrs, their courage would surely triumph in the court of
| public opinion. Alas.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I wonder how you would feel if you didn't agree with their
| movement. Would you still call them brave?
| retrochameleon wrote:
| This video essay about Bo Burnam was very interesting, and gave
| me a lot more context to his recent movie Inside. I enjoyed the
| movie a lot, but it had a lot more depth in the messaging than I
| even initially thought. I wasn't aware of a lot of his work
| prior, but he has been pretty consistent with his messaging
| throughout most of his career underlying the veil of humor.
|
| He once said very clearly and seriously, "if you can live your
| life without an audience, do it."
|
| I'm sure Tom experienced lots of the unfavorable aspects of the
| attention (and perhaps scrutiny) he garnered.
|
| https://youtu.be/I89Lz7CdLuM
| aamargulies wrote:
| I took Nature of Math from Lehrer in the 90s. He said on the
| first day of class that the class was for non-STEM majors and if
| any of us were science majors he'd find us and kick us out.
|
| I was a science major and I said to myself "Adam, I don't care
| what Tom Lehrer says, there's no way you you're not taking a math
| class from Tom Lehrer."
|
| He was bluffing. I stayed and loved every minute of it.
| jmspring wrote:
| I had his class in the 90s as well. Enjoyed it. UCSC was
| smaller then and some interesting classes I'm not sure would be
| possible today. Another I enjoyed was Frank Andrews (chemistry)
| course titled something like the chemistry of love.
| cyberax wrote:
| "Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared... be
| prepared!"
|
| There's a recording of "Tomfoolery" performance on iTunes!
| quonn wrote:
| Fun fact: Lehrer is the German word for teacher.
| swayvil wrote:
| Have you met the public? Fame is an acquired taste and more
| likely the lesser of evils.
| imetatroll wrote:
| All of those songs are worth a listen. True gold!
| noneeeed wrote:
| 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 something,
| and then going off and living a normal life sounds pretty great
| to me.
|
| As much as I love the maths based songs, my favourites are still
| Oedipus Rex and The Vatican Rag.
|
| Tom Lehrer and Flanders & Swann were the musical background to my
| childhood. If you enjoy Lehrer you might enjoy F&L too.
|
| While they don't have the science/maths background that makes
| Lehrer an obvious win for the HN crowd, F&Ls songs were razor
| sharp satires of the time. One or two have not aged so well, but
| most are great, although knowing a bit of British history helps.
| Like Lehrer they wrote songs about the insanity of war, nuclear
| weapons, and prejudice (A Song of Patriotic Prejudice is an
| awkward listen because of the terms used, but a great
| representation of English exceptionalism in the post colonial
| era).
| BizarroLand wrote:
| My favorite will always be poisoning pigeons in the park,
| introduced to me courtesy of Dr. Demento.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY
| fragmede wrote:
| The sun is a misama of incandescent plasma, by They Might be
| Giants for me.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA
|
| A 2009 follow-up to their original song from 1993, the sun
| song, in which they erroneously claimed the sun is a mass of
| incandescent gas, to weigh the follow-up song is a
| correction.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| My current song pedantry fave is _Nanobot_ , perfected by a
| video with 18 numbered [refs]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
|
| (presumably Brian May would have had his phases of astral
| matter correct in the first set of lyrics?)
| riedel wrote:
| I only knew the Austrian 'version' by Georg Kreisler [0] and
| only now learned about Lehrer now. Thanks.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Kreisler
| sophacles wrote:
| Mr Lehrer's treatment of Oedipus is one of my recent favorites.
| For the last few centuries it's usally approached in either and
| overly-serious or ham-fistedly humorous way - very tiresome.
| ska wrote:
| > 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
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I can't imagine many things worse than being famous
|
| "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous:
| 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it.
| There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying
| taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you
| become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."
|
| -- Bill Murray
| didip wrote:
| If you are very rich, fame seems to be a big liability. You can't
| even spend your wealth properly without nosey people following
| you around and make a big deal out of everything.
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