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Tom Lehrer's Lost Calculus Problem in 72 Lines of Verse (Lake Rotunda)

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Tags: calculusoptimization

In 1951, the great musical satirist Tom Lehrer, who was then teaching calculus at Harvard, wrote an especially Lehrerian optimization problem - in 72 lines of verse! - for his students. Tom gave me a copy of this problem 25 years ago. I've never seen it published before, so as a tribute to Tom, who passed away in July, I present it here.

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6 Overall score*

77 Rank

17 Votes

7 Comments

Comments

2.3

The setup was interesting but the video lacked any real mathematical explanation.

1.4

This could have been a lovely video, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem.

7.6

Super interesting, also a fun twist to not provide solution ;)

I enjoyed this. Although, wouldn’t it be best to just make the bridge as long as possible? like why not just make the bridge 8000 feet, straight across?

Thank you very much for introducing me to Tom Lehrer. I will definitely suggest him to my students because - even though the exercise itself is quite standard - the presentation is fantastic. I will try to translate it into my language, Italian, because I am a lover of poetry too. Thanks again, and best of luck with SoME4.

The question wasn’t specific enough, it should have more context, the poem’s nice though

Would’ve been better with the solution included in my opinion, but great video nonetheless