Piet Hein (December 16, 1905 - April 18, 1996) was a scientist, mathematician, inventor, author, and poet, often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym "Kumbel" meaning "tombstone". His short poems, gruks (or grooks), first started to appear in the daily newspaper "Politiken" shortly after the Nazi Occupation in April 1940 under the signature Kumbel Kumbell.

Biography

He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Copenhagen (later to become the Niels Bohr Institute), and Technical University of Denmark. Yale awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1972. He died in his home on Funen, Denmark in 1996.

He was a direct descendant of Piet Hein, the Dutch naval hero of the 16th century.

Work

He is known to a wider public for his thousands of short, aphoristic poems called Grooks (Gruk in Danish) and creations like the game of Hex, Tangloids, Morra, Tower, Polytaire , TacTix, Nimbi , Polytaire , Qrazy Qube , Pyramystery and the Soma cube. He advocated the use of the super ellipse curve in city planning, furniture making and other realms. He also invented a perpetual calendar called the Astro Calendar and marketed housewares based on the Superellipse and Super-Egg .

An example Grook from Grooks, first published in 1966:

Mankind

Men, said the Devil,

are good to their brothers:

they don't want to mend

their own ways, but each other's.

Bibliography

• "A Poet with a Slide Rule: Piet Hein Bestrides Art and Science," by Jim Hicks, Life Magazine, Vol. 61 No. 16, 10/14/66, pp.55-66
• Grooks, by Piet Hein, (1998) Borgens Forlag; ISBN 8741810791
• Collected Grooks I, by Piet Hein Borgens Forlag; ISBN 8721018596
• Collected Grooks II, by Piet Hein Borgens Forlag; ISBN 8721018618

References

• Gardner, Martin: Piet Hein's Superellipse. - in Gardner, Martin: Mathematical Carnival. A New Round-Up of Tantalizers and Puzzles from Scientific American. New York: Vintage, 1977, pp. 240-254.
• Johan Gielis: Inventing the circle. The geometry of nature. - Antwerpen : Geniaal Press, 2003. - ISBN 9080775614

External links

• Piet Hein Homepage
• Notes on Piet Hein, including several sample grooks.
• Superellipse (MathWorld)
• Grooks by Piet Hein