Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam was born in 1048 CE in Nishapur, Khorasan — a city of scholars and Silk Road commerce in what is now northeastern Iran. He was the son of a tent-maker and received an outstanding education in the philosophical and mathematical sciences. As a young man he sought patronage at several courts, eventually finding support from the Karakhanid ruler Shams al-Mulk in Samarkand and later, most crucially, from the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah and his great vizier Nizam al-Mulk.

It was under the Seljuk patronage of Malik-Shah that Khayyam achieved his most important scientific work. Around 1074 CE the sultan commissioned him to lead a group of astronomers in reforming the Persian calendar — a task that required precise astronomical observations and sophisticated mathematical modeling. Khayyam and his colleagues conducted years of careful observations and produced the Jalali calendar, named for the sultan's honorific title Jalal al-Din. This calendar had a year length of 365.24219858156 days — accurate to within one part in a million of the true solar year — making it more precise than the Gregorian calendar that Europe would adopt five centuries later. It required 2,820 years to accumulate a one-day error. The Jalali calendar remained in use in Persia for centuries and forms the basis of the modern Iranian Solar Hijri calendar still used today.

In mathematics, Khayyam produced work of the first order. His treatise on algebra — Risala fi al-Bara'hin ala Masa'il al-Jabr wal-Muqabala — systematically classified and solved cubic equations for the first time in the history of mathematics. He distinguished thirteen types of cubic equations and solved each type geometrically, using the intersection of conic sections (parabolas, hyperbolas, and circles) to find roots. He explicitly acknowledged that he could not find general arithmetic (algebraic) solutions to cubic equations and stated that this might be impossible — a conjecture that proved correct; it would not be until the Italian algebraists of the sixteenth century that general algebraic solutions to cubics were found, and Khayyam's geometric solutions remained the definitive treatment until then. He also developed a theory of proportions that extended and generalized Euclid's theory, and he worked on a parallel-postulate problem that placed him among the earliest precursors of non-Euclidean geometry.

Khayyam also wrote on physics, metaphysics, and the theory of music, and he produced commentaries on Euclid and Aristotle. But posterity has known him above all as a poet. He wrote quatrains — ruba'iyat — in Persian, and though he may not have composed them with any intention of systematic publication, they circulated in his lifetime and grew into a vast corpus after his death. These rubais are poems of extraordinary economy and force, meditating on the brevity of life, the value of pleasure in the face of death, the uncertainty of religious promises, the indifference of the cosmos, and the simple beauty of wine, friendship, and the turning seasons. They are simultaneously skeptical and sensuous, philosophically serious and deeply human.

The Rubaiyat became famous in the English-speaking world through Edward FitzGerald's 1859 free translation, which was not so much a translation as a creative reimagining. FitzGerald's Rubaiyat was one of the best-selling poetry volumes of the Victorian era and made "Omar Khayyam" a household name in Britain and America — though the image FitzGerald projected was filtered through his own Victorian pessimism and bore only a partial resemblance to the historical Khayyam.

In his later years Khayyam faced changing political fortunes. After the death of Malik-Shah in 1092 and the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk in the same year, the Seljuk court became less hospitable to philosophical inquiry. Khayyam came under suspicion from orthodox religious authorities who found his philosophical skepticism and his poetry's celebration of wine and earthly pleasures incompatible with Islamic piety. He reportedly made a pilgrimage to Mecca — perhaps to deflect accusations of heresy. He spent his later decades in Nishapur, continuing to teach and write, though on a reduced scale. A student who visited him in his final years left an account of Khayyam reading Ibn Sina's Kitab al-Shifa and pausing to pray, close the book, and declare that he had reached the end of what he could know. He died in Nishapur in 1131 CE, aged approximately eighty-three, and was buried in a garden, as he had wished.