Tom Lehrer's Mathematical Songs (1951)
mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk
I found three albums of his - "That was the year that was", "An evening wasted with Tom Lehrer" and "Antoher evening wasted". They cover the more famous parts of his repertoire, and for the rest you'll likely have to look through YouTube and the internet.
Highly recommended.
With rare exceptions ("The laws of thermodynamics") they didn't write about the sciences, but they were musically a bit more sophisticated and just as witty.
Their satire was far less biting but was present. Although Michael Flanders did monologue: "The purpose of Satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth - and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again." :)
I recommend their delightful animal song "The Sloth" as having pertinence to my fellows in the HN audience who have trouble with procrastination...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwJ4iKv0H70&list=OLAK5uy_m5z...
(It's tempting to recount some here, but I think it's better to hear it from the man himself.)
Happily, although he hasn't performed in decades, Tom Lehrer is still alive today, at the age of 92.
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once ze rockets are up, who cares where zey come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
On a separate note, I find it interesting that he's making casual jokes about himself being gay/bi. I don't know what the times were like, or really even when that video was made, but do wonder if that raised a few (more, I guess) eyebrows
growing up we had two Tom Lehrer albums (I guess my parents had their good points)
It's the one occasion I can think of where I feel Tom Lehrer's satire was truly misdirected. One of many reasons I appreciate him so much is otherwise that when the sharp wit was at someone's expense, they had earned it (and this in contrast to the practice with most contemporary purported comedians, at least in my country).
http://www.claymath.org/euclid/index/book-1-postulates (the image is clickable, but it's all greek to me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate#History
I think Lehrer was counting on both the Danny Kaye reference and his prosody statement to hint at where this song stands with respect to Poe's Law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24281288
Every once in a while I'd pull out a Tom Lehrer tune, but you really need the right audience for it.
Fun fact: Tom Lehrer and Steven Sondheim were childhood friends.
https://youtu.be/91BQqdNOUxs : Silent E
Lehrer's technique here was a common Cold War trope: one daren't mention any second-world achievements directly in english works, but cloaked in enough pejoratives they'd slip past the censorship of the crowd, while people who could evaluate for themselves did.
Looks like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobachevsky_Prize has suffered some endo-mathematical drama recently.
- the inspirational Danny Kaye sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXI2djKeerQ
- and, lest anyone worry about the exhaustivity of my case analysis, Bergman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk_A115Src ("the squaw of the hippopotamus")