A better version of this piece is now kept on my blog at An Appreciation of Piet Hein: The Man Who Wrote 10,000 Grooks.
If you like this essay, you'll like my other work at Belief Systems & Other BS.
In a sort
of reverse internal earthquake that happened to me recently, I realized that
the Soma Cube,
a childhood obsession that I have passed on to my children, the board game Hex, a mid-life obsession that
I am passing on to my children, and Grooks, brilliant little poems that I
should really get my kids interested in, were all the product of one man, a
Danish polymath named Piet Hein (1905-1996). In the depth and breadth of his
thinking only his fellow renaissance men Leonardo da Vinci and Buckminster
Fuller compare – but they get far better press. Compare Google searches: Leo
turns up 11,000 pages, Bucky is close with 9,500 pages, but Piet (pronounced
‘Pete’) only rates 2,000 pages. There are no biographies, few magazine
articles, and only perfunctory mentions in encyclopedias. He is the greatest
mind you never heard of. Why?
He chose
his native language unwisely. Danish, a linguistic jail for a poet-philosopher,
has only 5 million or so speakers. Revered in Denmark, Hein only flirted with
renown elsewhere.
His closest approach came in
1964 when he invented the super-ellipse in response to the problem of Sergel’s
Square in Stockholm. A traffic loop was needed in the roughly rectangular city
center. A circle would not work, an ellipse wasted space in the corners, a
rectangle would not allow fast traffic flow – what to do? Hein described his thinking
about the problem in an essay that perfectly captures his blend of philosophy
and science:
“Man is the animal that
draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of
civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and
rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons,
mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight
lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily – physically or
mentally – around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket,
having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be
better. To draw something freehand – such as the patchwork traffic circle they
tried in Stockholm – will not do. It isn’t fixed, isn’t definite like a circle
or square. You don’t know what it is. It isn’t esthetically satisfying. The
super-ellipse solved the problem. It is neither round nor rectangular, but in
between. Yet it is fixed, it is definite – it has a unity.”
Put
simply, Piet Hein took nothing for granted, not even rectangles. The
super-ellipse went on to a career in furniture and industrial design, and
currently stars as the body of Big Mike , the
Viridian mascot.
The Soma Cube and Hex were both billed as
children’s games, though they are really – or are also – sophisticated
expressions of topological beauty. Of the Cube, Hein wrote, “It is a
beautiful freak of nature that the seven simplest irregular combinations of
cubes can form a cube again. Variety growing out of unity returns to unity. It
is the world’s smallest philosophical system.”
Hex has
the interesting distinction of having been invented by two different
distinguished mathematicians. Hein was first, in 1942, and John Nash
independently ‘re-invented’ it in 1948 while at Princeton. Not just a game, but
the progenitor of a new class of games – “connector games” – Hex has several
interesting properties. Games cannot be drawn, and though it has been shown
that there is a winning strategy, no one knows what it is. In other
words, it is also a philosophical system.
And then
there are the grooks, all 10,000 of them. They contain his whole philosophy, in
manageable chunks. They have been compared to Biblical proverbs, or the
writings of Goethe.
Hein hoped that the grooks would be his
legacy. He learned several other languages in order to translate them himself.
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve heard, or even recited one.
Problems
Problems worthy of attack,
prove their worth by hitting
back.”
A Maxim for Vikings
Here is a fact
that should help you fight a
bit longer:
Things that don’t actually
kill you outright
make you stronger.
The Road to Wisdom
The road to wisdom?-
Well, it’s plain and simple
to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Grooks
were Hein’s response to Germany’s occupation of Denmark, published as a way of
encouraging his countrymen. ‘Grook’ is a meaningless word, pulled out of thin
air; when they came to number in the 1,000s, Hein said that he should have
named them more carefully.
Hein is
overdue for his fifteen minutes and it will be a fine thing if he gets them. If
it happens, it won’t be for his games, science, or the Grooks; it will be for
the philosophy underlying all of his work. In the ‘40s, he began to write of
the two cultures, “cultism” and “technocy”, “The first term having
not-unintended echoes of ‘occultism’ and the second having certain qualities in
common with ‘idiocy’”. So in the 40s he began to describe the great divide
of our day; the divide, not between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, but
between the ‘knows’ and the ‘know nots’. His solution was art:
“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.”
Sadly,
Piet Hein is out of print in English. Sadly, because his ideas are needed
now. It is easy to say that art is the solution to the world’s problems,
more difficult to live it. Hein lived it. “The man who is only a
poet,” or only a scientist, he would have added, “is not even
that.”
A better version of this piece is now kept on my blog at An Appreciation of Piet Hein: The Man Who Wrote 10,000 Grooks.
If you like this essay, you'll like my other work at Belief Systems & Other BS.