Once that had happened, I wrote to Mr. Lehrer with a copy of the paper and a letter asking if he had ever gotten in trouble for it. He kindly wrote back, including a copy of the paper that had been published in Journal of SIAM in 1958, under a slightly different title. Nobody, he said, caught him.

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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/...

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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."

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It struck me as a very Lehrer-ish sort of prank. It's harmless, it's light-hearted, and it thumbs its nose a bit at stuffy respectability through its unfailing pretense of seriousness. How had other people reacted to the joke, I wondered?

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Now, it's important to note: this paper was published internally in 1957. Tom Lehrer had recorded and released "Songs by Tom Lehrer" in 1953, with "Lobachevsky" included. The song had already achieved some success. ...but nobody at the NSA noticed when he and Fagan dropped it in as a reference.

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