"The copyist arrived at the last minute with the parts and passed them out to the band... And there was no title on it, and there was no lyrics. And so they ran through it, 'what a pleasant little waltz'... And the engineer said, '"Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,' take one," and the piano player said, '"What?"' and literally fell off the stool." And one of the finest stanzas of all time: was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold. Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. But I think of great Lobachevsky and I get idea - haha!The album—which included the macabre "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", the mildly risqué "Be Prepared", and "Lobachevsky" (regarding plagiarizing mathematicians) became a cult success via word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion. Lehrer embarked on a series of concert tours and recorded a second album, which was released in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded while An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert. In 2013, Lehrer recalled the studio sessions:
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It
I took an awful non-Euclidean geometry class my last semester as an undergraduate. The professor mumbled incomprehensibly, and sometimes stopped lecturing to play his flute. There were assigned textbooks, but no reference was ever made to them. He would listen to questions, but then answer with something completely unrelated. About the only way to make sense of the problem sets was to figure out where he'd gotten them from and read that. He disapproved of us doing that, though, so we started using "anyone want to study Lobachevsky after class?" as code for "I know where this problem set comes from, meet me in the library and I'll share."And one of the finest stanzas of all time: