Researching Richard Lyons

While looking through used records in a thrift store in the mid 1980s, Lyons discovered a 1968 LP by Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle entitled If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Lyons was intrigued by the LP and brought it to the other members of Negativland. They sampled phrases and rearranged words from Pirkle's sermon to create the song "Christianity Is Stupid" which was released on their 1987 album Escape From Noise. Another song from Escape From Noise, "Nesbitt's Lime Soda Song", was composed and sung by Lyons.

In 1988, Richard Lyons masterminded a hoaxed press release that claimed the Negativland song "Christianity Is Stupid" had inspired 16-year-old David Brom to murder his entire immediate family. It also claimed that Negativland had been "advised by Federal official Dick Jordan not to leave town pending an investigation into the Brom murders". Lyons came up with the idea for the press release when Negativland could not afford to go on tour in support of Escape From Noise. Lyons prepared the phony press release and mailed it out to various news outlets, many of whom took it at face value. The hoax received widespread media coverage, inspiring Negativland's next album Helter Stupid.

After taking a brief hiatus from the group, Lyons composed and sang several songs on Negativland's 1997 album Dispepsi, including "Happy Hero" and "The Greatest Taste Around". He also created an art piece using letters found in junkyard cars. He compiled and arranged the found letters with photographs of the wrecked cars, to create a Xeroxed book that he distributed to friends. Lyons recorded a segment about his book for an episode of This American Life entitled "Other People's Mail". In 2002, the book was released by Negativland with an accompanying soundtrack CD as Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak.

Lyons traveled with the band during its "True or False" tour, doing a mid-show version of "Pastor Dick's Treehouse".

Lyons received his PhD in 1970 at the University of Chicago under John Griggs Thompson with a thesis entitled Characterizations of Some Finite Simple Groups with Small 2-Rank. From 1972 to 2017 he was a professor at Rutgers University.

With Daniel Gorenstein and Ronald Solomon he wrote, and is continuing to write, a series on the classification program for finite simple groups, a program in which the three of them were major participants. Nine volumes of this series have been published so far. He discovered a sporadic group which Charles Sims constructed and called the Lyons group Ly.

In 2012 he shared the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition, awarded by the American Mathematical Society, with Michael Aschbacher, Stephen D. Smith, and Ronald Solomon.In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to the classification of the finite simple groups, including the discovery of one of the 26 sporadic finite simple groups.".