Piet Hein

Biography

In 1940, soon after the German invasion of Denmark, the newspaper Politiken printed a short poem about a lost glove. It was signed with the pseudonym Kumbel (Kumbel Kumbell). The censor noticed nothing suspicious. The meaning was this: if you have lost one glove, that is, your freedom, do not throw away the other, your patriotism and self-respect, by collaborating with the occupiers. It was the first grook.

Piet Hein was born on 16 December 1905 in Copenhagen. He was an only child: his mother, Estrid Hein, was an ophthalmologist, and his father was an engineer. The family was well educated, and artists and scientists came to the house, Niels Bohr among them. Hein was descended from a Dutch naval officer and folk hero of the seventeenth century, Piet Pieterszoon Hein, his namesake. He grew up in Rungsted and finished the Metropolitan School in Copenhagen, specialising in mathematics. He then went to Stockholm to study at the Royal Swedish Art School, but did not complete the course. Back in Copenhagen, he took up theoretical physics at the University of Copenhagen, in the institute later named after Niels Bohr, and again took no degree. He also studied at the Technical University of Denmark. In his own words, in the years between the wars he “played mental ping-pong” with Bohr.

When the Germans occupied Denmark, as he explained in 1968, he saw three paths: do nothing, flee to neutral Sweden or join the Resistance. Sweden was out because he was Danish; he could not stay at home because every knock at the door would have frightened him. He joined the Resistance, and his main weapon was the pen. The grooks spread quickly across the country and were written on walls. The Danes understood them, the Germans did not.

His first collections appeared in 1940–1942: “Gruk” (three collections), “77 Gruk”, “Vers i Verdensrummet” and “Kumbels Almanak 1942”. In all, Hein published, by various counts, between forty and sixty books in Danish and English, about half of them collections of grooks. He made his own drawing for each poem. The English-language grooks, about four hundred of them, brought him worldwide fame: it was from the English that they were translated into other languages. In Russian, three grooks first appeared in the magazine “Nauka i zhizn” (Science and Life) in 1968, translated by the physicists Igor Mikhailov and Yakov Smorodinsky from Dubna; later the magazine “Priroda” (Nature) printed translations by a physicist and poet from Dubna who wrote under the pseudonym Nedrov. Norbert Wiener, who read Hein, advised looking for at least two layers of meaning in his epigrams. By some accounts he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.

Alongside this ran another line of work, mathematical. In 1942 he invented a game that was first called “Polygon” and then “Hex”. He invented the Soma cube, as well as the games Tangloids, Tower, Polytaire, TacTix and others. In 1959 the city authorities of Stockholm announced a competition for a roundabout at Sergels Torg. Hein’s proposal won; it was based on the superellipse, a curve that Gabriel Lamé had described mathematically long before. Hein made the superellipse the basis of furniture and housewares, and its three-dimensional form, the “superegg”, became a souvenir and design object: the eggs were produced in Skjern in cooperation with a local partner, Skjøde Knudsen, and sold in more than thirty countries. He also devised a perpetual calendar, the Astro Calendar. An eleven-metre sundial, Helix Helios, stands in the park of Egeskov Castle.

Hein was a friend of Martin Gardner, whose column in Scientific American often wrote about his games. The title of Gardner’s autobiography, “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus”, comes from one of the grooks.

The list of his awards is long: the Alexander Graham Bell Silver Bell (1968), the Emil Aarestrup Medal (1969), an honorary doctorate from Yale University (1972), the Storm P. Prize (1978), an invitation to give a Nobel Lecture (1983), the Danish Design Council’s annual prize (1989), the Tietgen Medal (1990) and an honorary doctorate from Odense University (1991). From 1969 to 1976 he lived near London, then settled at the Damsbo manor house on the island of Funen. He died on 17 April 1996 in Middelfart.