With Tom Lehrer’s recent passing, there have been a lot of lovely and entertaining remembrances and anecdotes. But my favorite was this thread on BlueSky.
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.
— Opal (@opalescentopal.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM
In it, the OP recounts how they worked as a mathematician at the NSA and knew that Lehrer had worked there as well during the Korean War era. They decided to find out whether Lehrer had published any papers internally during his time there that might still be on file and found several classified papers and one unclassified paper, “Gambler’s Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary,” co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The paper cites only a few sources, one of which is
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!"</p>— Opal (<a href=”https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wn5sx5neaortppmdqj5gnksn?ref_src=embed”>@opalescentopal.bsky.social</a>) <a href=”https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wn5sx5neaortppmdqj5gnksn/post/3luxxx27xhe23?ref_src=embed”>July 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM</a></blockquote><script async src=”https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
But no one at NSA had ever noticed. So . . .
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: media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/…
— Opal (@opalescentopal.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM