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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