Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated mathematician whose brief side gig as one of America’s favorite satirical composers captured in tune some of the anxieties and absurdities of the 1950s and 1960s, has died, according to the New York Times. He was 97.

Lehrer died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Times said, citing a friend of Lehrer’s, David Herder.

Best known for music-hall numbers such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "The Masochism Tango" and "The Elements" — a rat-a-tat recitation of the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s "Major-General’s Song" — Lehrer drew on the musical theater tradition and his experiences in America’s elite academic institutions to create his songs.

His oeuvre stretched from the whimsical to the macabre, and he once reveled in a New York Times review that said his muse was “not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”

In a ditty on polluted air in American cities, he sang, “See the halibuts and the sturgeons, being wiped out by detergeons.” Another tune called the U.S. South “the land of the boll weevil, where the laws are medieval.” A song about U.S. military power included the line, “We only want the world to know, that we support the status quo. They love us everywhere we go. So when in doubt, send the Marines!”

And in a football fight song composed for Harvard, his oft-undersized alma mater, he cheered, “Demonstrate to them our skill. Albeit they possess the might, nonetheless we have the will.”

Some of his later pieces like "The Vatican Rag" and "National Brotherhood Week" were more overtly political than much of his earlier work.

“For a few years, on albums and in concerts, Lehrer was a comedy hero to the intelligentsia and other lonely people,” Time magazine wrote in 2000.

Kissinger’s Nobel

Following his retreat from public performance in the 1970s, Lehrer famously said that political satire became obsolete after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state during the final parts of the Vietnam War whose name was not typically associated with peace-making.

In his longer career in academics, Lehrer taught students at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wellesley College. In 1972, he joined the University of California Santa Cruz — home to the Banana Slugs athletic teams — teaching an introductory course for liberal arts majors that he referred to as “math for tenors” as well as a class on musical theater. He delivered his final lecture there in 2001.

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born into a secular Jewish family in Manhattan, New York, on April 9, 1928, the son of Morris James Lehrer and Anna Waller.

He studied classical piano from the age of 7 but gravitated toward popular music and wrote comic songs while studying at Harvard, which he entered when he was only 15. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1946 and his master’s degree the following year. He was also part of the college’s doctoral program for several years until around 1953 but did not complete that degree.

While at Harvard, he wrote a collection of academic song parodies called "The Physical Revue" — a pun on the name of the Physical Review scientific journals. This revue, which was staged on several occasions, included a tribute to academic plagiarism titled "Lobachevsky."

Los Alamos

Among Harvard colleagues involved with the production were future Nobel Prize-winning physicist Norman Ramsey and Lewis Branscomb, who went on to be head of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and chief scientist at International Business Machines Corp.

A stint with the US Army at the Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear facility in the 1950s — which Lehrer later revealed involved work for the then-classified National Security Agency — influenced the subject matter of songs like "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier" and "We Will All Go Together When We Go."

The latter was a black comic ditty reflecting on the prospects of a Cold War atomic apocalypse that he referred to jokingly as a “survival hymn.”

Lehrer went on to perform his material in nightclubs and made his first recording in 1953. Having paid for his own studio time and struggling to get airplay on radio for the self-published work, Lehrer sold his record on the Harvard campus, leading its popularity to grow largely through word of mouth.

After a series of concert tours — and a stint as a drafted enlisted soldier between 1955 and 1957 — he released a second album in 1958.

Frost’s show

In the early 1960s, he contributed topical songs to David Frost’s television show "That Was the Week That Was." Some of the songs from the period were recorded on the album "That Was the Year That Was" in 1965.

Around 37 at that point and despite his various achievements, Lehrer joked on the album, “It is a sobering thought, for example, that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

His popularity spread over the years from the U.S. to Britain and elsewhere, and he toured at various points in Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.

He gave up the stage completely for around a quarter century after performing on a 1972 fundraising tour for George McGovern, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

He didn’t return to the stage until 1998, when he appeared twice at London’s Lyceum Theatre, including one show before Queen Elizabeth II.

Around half a century after most of his best-known works for written and first-performed, Lehrer’s comedy and music remained a touchstone for legions of fans around the world, and they were issued as a CD box set in 2000. In 2020, he formally relinquished all copyright, performing rights and recording rights to his songs, transferring his music and lyrics into the public domain.

Lehrer was renowned for being very reluctant to discuss his private life, remarking only when asked once if he was married or had children that he was “not guilty on both counts.”

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