Piet Hein

Piet Hein (1905 - 1996)
Piet Hein was a Danish polymath (mathematician, inventor, designer, writer 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 German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell". He also invented the Soma cube and the board game Hex.

Hein, a direct descendant of Piet Pieterszoon Hein, the 17th century Dutch naval figure, was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later to become the Niels Bohr Institute) of the University of Copenhagen, and Technical University of Denmark. Yale awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1972. He died in his home on Funen, Denmark in 1996.