Piet Hein

Danish Renaissance man: philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, artist, author and poet. Lived 1905-1996.

Piet (pronounced like the English name "Pete") Hein created a new geometrical form, the "SuperEllipse", which is something in between the rectangle and the ellipse. The form also came in a 3D version called the "super-ellipsoid" or "super egg". Hein created the super-ellipse in 1964 to solve the problem of building a traffic loop in a roughly rectangular street intersection in Stockholm: a circle would not fit, an ellipse wasted space in the corners, and a rectangle would not allow fast traffic flow. DonKnuth used super-ellipses in Metafont in lieu of circular arcs (which are apparently harder to draw efficiently using integer arithmetic). More prosaically, AndrewKoenig used super-ellipses as part of his kitchen counter

(The use of the superellipse in font design is better attributed to Hermann Zapf, who employed it in designing the Melior face in, I believe, 1952.)

PietHein also invented the Soma puzzle cube (see http://www.fam-bundgaard.dk/SOMA/SOMA.HTM).

PietHein wrote thousands of pithy epigrammatic poems for which he coined the term grooks. They became popular all over the world in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

Two samples (probably his most widely known):

The road to wisdom

Well it's plain

And simple to express.

Err and err and err again

But less

And less

And less.

and

Problems worthy of attack

Prove their worth by hitting back.

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