Omar Khayyam

Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū'l-Fath ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām al-Nīshāpūrī was born in 1048 CE in Nishapur, then one of the great cities of the Khorasan plateau and a centre of learning under the Seljuks. His surname, Khayyām, means "tent-maker" — likely his father's trade.

By his early twenties he was already known across the Islamic world for his treatise on algebra. In 1074 the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk summoned him to Isfahan to lead a new observatory and reform the calendar — a commission he completed in five years.

Khayyam's Treatise on Demonstrations of Problems of Algebra (c. 1070) classified cubic equations into fourteen types and gave a geometric solution for each by intersecting conic sections. No European mathematician would surpass this work until Cardano and Tartaglia in the sixteenth century.

In 1079 CE Khayyam completed the Jalali calendar, a 33-year solar cycle of eight leap years (rather than the Gregorian's 400-year cycle of 97). His calendar's mean year is 365.2424 days — closer to the true tropical year than the Gregorian's 365.2425. It remains the official civil calendar of Iran and Afghanistan today, almost a thousand years later.

The quatrains attributed to Khayyam — short four-line stanzas in a strict rhyme scheme — circulated in Persia for centuries as a thinker's diversion. Their themes are constant: the silence of the universe, the inevitability of death, the call to live the present hour.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

In 1859 the English scholar Edward FitzGerald published a free translation of seventy-five quatrains. It went unnoticed for two years, then exploded into one of the most reprinted books of the Victorian age and the most widely read translation of any foreign poem into English.