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For the Dutch naval hero see Piet Hein (Netherlands).

Bust of Piet Hein

Piet Hein (December 16, 1905 - April 17, 1996) was a Danish 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 pseudonym Kumbel Kumbell.

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 Pieterszoon Hein, the Dutch naval hero of the 17th century.

Piet Hein's super-egg in brass

He is known to a wider public for his thousands of short, aphoristic poems called Grooks (Gruk in Danish) and creations like the games of Hex, Tangloids, Morra, Tower, Polytaire, TacTix, Nimbi, 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.

A couple of example Grooks from Grooks, first published in English 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.

Double Doors

Double doors are justified

because they're comfortably wide;

therefore, you only half undo 'em;

therefore, nothing can get through 'em.

• Grooks – 20 volumes, originally published between 1940 and 1963, all currently out-of-print

• 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 90-807756-1-4
• "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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Piet Hein

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