Omar Khayyam

Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami, known as Omar Khayyam, was a mathematician, astronomer and poet of the Seljuk era. He is conventionally said to have been born at Nishapur in Khurasan (eastern Iran) on 18 May 1048; the date is a modern reconstruction from a horoscope recorded by al-Bayhaqi, who knew him. He died at Nishapur, most accounts giving 4 December 1131, though some sources place his death earlier and the exact year is disputed.

Khayyam studied at Nishapur, then about 1070 went to Samarkand, where under the patronage of the jurist Abu Tahir he completed his celebrated Treatise on the Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (al-jabr, "restoration"), notable for solving cubic equations geometrically. From 1074 he served Sultan Malik-Shah and the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, directing an observatory at Isfahan; the resulting solar calendar reform (the Jalali era, inaugurated 1079) was extraordinarily accurate.

In Islamic understanding he was a Muslim of the Sunni milieu; his precise religious convictions are debated, since hostile contemporaries accused him of free-thinking and a later report (al-Qifti) says he made the pilgrimage (hajj) partly to quiet such suspicions.

The quatrains (ruba'iyat) that made him world-famous in Edward FitzGerald's 1859 English version are only loosely tied to him: scholars agree he wrote poetry, but which surviving verses are genuinely his cannot be securely established.