i can't recall the name either, but there was an article a month or two ago about him in metropolis... he and some other guy are investigating ways to mass produce his screens...

found it... i think that you're referring to erwin hauer...

here's the link to the story in the october 2006 metropolis...

enrique rosado is the guy that is trying to help him reproduce the forms digitally...

that guy's a baller

no doubt.

I had to quote this, from the article above:

'What Schoen documented was a type of three-dimensional surface he later named the Innercore-Wrapped Package (I-WP), which Hauer had intuitively discovered on his own more than a decade earlier. NASA scientists—interested in the potential material applications of synthetic microstructures—had tried to patent the I-WP only to find that one of Hauer’s patents for the continua had beat them to it. “They had to sharpen their own patent description until it no longer infringed on mine,” Hauer says. “It took them a year.”'

Thanks,
He's the one I was thinking of.