Piet Hein (scientist)
| Piet Hein | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
16 December 1905 Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Died | 17 April 1996 (aged 90) Funen, Denmark |
| Known for | Puzzles, poems |
Piet Hein (16 December 1905 – 17 April 1996) was a Danish mathematician, inventor, designer, author, and poet, often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym "Kumbel" meaning "tombstone". His short poems, known as gruks or grooks (Danish: gruk), first started to appear in the daily newspaper "Politiken" shortly after the Nazi occupation in April 1940 under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell".
Hein, a direct descendant of Piet Pieterszoon Hein, the 17th-Century Dutch naval hero, 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.
Piet Hein, who, in his own words, "played mental ping-pong" with Niels Bohr in the inter-War period, found himself confronted with a dilemma when the Germans occupied Denmark. He felt that he had three choices: Do nothing, flee to "neutral" Sweden or join the Danish resistance movement. As he explained in 1968, "Sweden was out because I am not Swedish, but Danish. I could not remain at home because, if I had, every knock at the door would have sent shivers up my spine. So, I joined the Resistance."
Taking as his first weapon the instrument with which he was most familiar, the pen, he wrote and had published his first "grook" (gruk in Danish). It passed the censors who did not grasp its real meaning.
CONSOLATION GROOK
Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.
...
Wikipedia