…
I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer’s music, and I knew
he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.
The NSA’s research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let’s see if we can find anything he published internally!And I found a few articles
I can’t comment on. But there was one unclassified article– “Gambler’s Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary”.
The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that’s not what stuck out to me when I read it.
See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources. What’s the leftover?
…
So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort
of stuff.
The answer came back: “We’ve never heard of this before. It’s news to us.”
In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke.
…