Who is Adrian Frutiger? What makes Univers "unique"? What is the Univers grid?

Adrian Frutiger is one of the most well known typeface designers of the twentieth century, and is now helping to influence the direction of digital typography into the twenty-first century. Adrian is best known for creating the typefaces Frutiger (named after himself) and Univers.  As a boy in Switzerland growing up, he experimented with inventing scripts and stylized hand writting as a reaction to his dislike of the formal, cursive penmanship required in the Swiss school he attended.  By the age of 16 he was working as a printer's apprentice near his hometown. 

He loved sculpture and that is his true passion behind his type forms, but he was discouraged to sculpt as a profession by his father as well as by his secondary school teachers.

He attended Kuristgeruerbescne (school of applied arts) in Zurich, where he studied primarily calligraphy, a craft favoring the nib and the brush, instead of drafting tools.  Frutiger created the Univers typeface in 1956.  What makes the Univers grid so "unique" is that different weights and variations within the type family are designated by the use of numbers rather then names, but in the Univers family, the typeface names include both number and letter suffixes.

http://typophile.com/node/12118

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Frutiger