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Edinburgh Geologist | ![]() | ||||||||
Astro-gymnastics by Piet Hein
"A what?" I hear you ask. "A grook." Many years ago I walked into a second hand book shop and came out with a small volume entitled Still more grooks by Piet Hein. It was a gem and, search though I did, I never found any books entitled 'Grooks' or even 'More grooks' that I could add to my collection. But what is a grook? Well, it is defined on the back cover in dictionary-style: grook (grewk) n. a short rhyming epigram, usually accompanied by a relevant illustration and that is exactly what it is! The interesting thing is that over the years, I have never heard of grooks written by anyone but Piet Hein. So who was he? He was born in Copenhagen in December 1905. Not only
was he a poet, Piet Hein was a mathematician and scientist, an engineer and inventor,
or, to put it simply, a polymath. Little known outside Denmark, though he wrote
in English with equal ease, he also invented the Soma Cube and, with John Nash,
created the game of Hex. He died in 1996. while Martin Gardner of Scientific American fame writes:
I took the book down from my shelf recently and discovered (or rather I should say re-discovered) a grook with a particularly geological slant. It goes under the unlikely title of Astro-gymnastics and I encourage you all to read it and maybe even try it out one clear, starlit night! It is published here by kind permission of Piet Hein's son, Hugo Piet Hein.
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