Tom Lehrer was a spy agency prankster
Tom Lehrer, the mathematician and satirist who died July 26 at 97, secretly worked for the National Security Agency in the mid-1950s.
While there, he pulled off a prank that went undiscovered for decades.
Lehrer’s obituary in The New York Times didn’t mention his service with the NSA, only that he had once been in the Army.
The agency’s existence was classified when Lehrer worked there. The standard joke was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”
Lehrer said in a 2012 interview that he “arranged” to get a job at the NSA in 1955 after his college draft deferment ended.
“I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy job.”
He was already well-known for his satirical songs. His first album, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” came out in 1953. He was also pursuing a Ph.D. he never finished.
A woman who joined the NSA decades later wrote on Bluesky after his death that she came across an unclassified paper on mathematics Lehrer had written while at the spy agency. The bibliography cited a paper by 19th-century Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky. Its title was “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds.”
The paper he cited didn’t exist. It was a reference to Lehrer’s 1953 song “Lobachevsky,” which satirized mathematicians:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize
Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”
Lehrer told the woman who found the fake citation the NSA never caught on.