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.
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- Err and err and err again
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- But less
-
- And less
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- And less.
and
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- Problems worthy of attack
-
- Prove their worth by hitting back.
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