Piet Hein - Mathematician, Poet, Physicist and Designer
Having success both in fine arts and the objective science world is hard to achieve but Piet Hein did this brilliantly. He is well known for his achievments in many sectors: designer, scientist, poet, game inventor and mathematician. About himself he said that "I actually think that I could also have become an economist and a chess player too, but not at the same time. The same talents are involved, but they have to be channelled".
From his name you might believe Piet Hein was Dutch but he was born in Denmark in 1905 and grew up there. His name comes from a Dutch naval captain in his family that is famous for being a naval hero (or a pirate depending on who you ask). He started his education by studying mathematics and philosophy to later move to Stockholm in 1925 to become a painter at the Royal Swedish College of Fine Arts. In 1927 he decided to move back to Denmark and study more philosophy as well as Theoretical Physics. When he finished his studies in 1931 he devoted a few years to inventions creating a rotor machine and the coloroscope among other things.
Piet Hein was working with a variety of things in different areas. Mainly because he believed that bridging knowledge across disciplines is very important to do. He was an intellectual who quickly became friends with some of the most famous smart people around him such as Charlie Chaplin, Niels Bohr and Einstein. These friendship and connections gave him many interesting exchanges of ideas across disciplines.
"I am probably some sort of specialist, but my speciality cuts across traditional subject boundaries which keep experts apart. That was why I gained much pleasure from the discussions in the international group of scientists which I called “Ten Wise Men – and Me”, for we dealt with the possibility of building bridges between the sciences. The interconnectedness of things has always been terribly important to me"
From his deep knowledge of mathematics and his visual mind shaped by fine arts he managed to create several puzzles and games over the years. One of the most famous one is the Soma Cube (displayed above) where you are to add the pieces together to create a cube. He also invented several other puzzles / games such as the Qrazy Qube, Hex, Morra, TacTix, Polytaire and Pyramystery.
From his exploration of form and function he invented a new geometrical figure called the 'super ellipse'. It can be explained as something in between a circle and a square. One can see it as a circle inside a square, where the cirle is filled out to the edges. This shape was very useful both in design as well as city planning, it has been used for the main square in Stockholm (Sergels torg) to solve traffic problems there and it has been applied in several other cities around the world as well. The 3d version of the super ellipse is called the 'super egg'.
The super ellipse was used for design as well. One of the most famous examples being Piet Hein's Ellipse Table. He created the table with help from the designers Bruno Mathsson and Arne Jacobsen. With the tables rounded corner it gives a lot of space and equal seating to the people at the table.
In the 1930s Denmark was struck by the Nazi occupation. Piet Hein fought this with the best weapon he had: his words. He started writing small poems, that he called Grooks, under the pseudonym Kumbel for the newspaper Politiken. This Grooks were a way of giving small life advice in as few words as possible. He created more than 7000 Grooks during his lifetime but one of the most famous is related to Danes keeping their pride and fighting the occupation:
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.
Piet Hein studied a lot of philosophy and therefore had a deep approach to art. He was always looking for the interconnectedness of things and often avoiding the path of least resistance to find alternative solutions. Difficulties are unavoidable and Piet found it important exploring them and one advice he gave to a young craftsman was that "One must choose a material that can say no!" to find good solutions. He considered that "art is solution to problems which cannot be formulated clearly before they have been solved".
"After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin... Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved" - Piet Hein
An anecdote about Piet Hein will end this description about this remarkable man. The psychology department of the University of Copenhagen once had an experiment looking at how different people experience things and motions in different ways. The experiment was performed with different colored discs rotating at changing speeds and people were asked to describe their experiences afterwards. Piet Hein was one of the test persons in this experiment and about this he said:
"I was the one who experienced most. That was what the psychologists maintained, at any rate. And it is true that I experienced enough to fill nine sheets of paper in the scientific protocol that was written. The next-best only filled seven pages, and he even had to be fetched directly from Sankt Hans’ mental hospital and be taken back there immediately after the experiment!"