Omar Khayyám
Persian polymath
1048 CE to 1131 CE
Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Abu'l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām Nīshāpūrī (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) is a Persian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet.
He also writes treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.
Born in Nishapur, at a young age he moves to Samarkand and obtains his education there.
Afterwards he moves to Bukhara and becomes established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period.
He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle.
He contributes to a calendar reform.
His significance as a philosopher and teacher, and his few remaining philosophical works, have not received the same attention as his scientific and poetic writings.
Al-Zamakhshari referred to him as “the philosopher of the world”.
Many sources have testified that he taught for decades the philosophy of Avicenna in Nishapur where Khayyám was born and buried and where his mausoleum today remains a masterpiece of Iranian architecture visited by many people every year.
Outside Iran and Persian speaking countries, Khayyám has had an impact on literature and societies through the translation of his works and popularization by other scholars.
The greatest such impact was in English-speaking countries; the English scholar Thomas Hyde (1636–1703) was the first non-Persian to study him.
The most influential of all was Edward FitzGerald (1809–83), who made Khayyám the most famous poet of the East in the West through his celebrated translation and adaptations of Khayyám's rather small number of quatrains in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Omar Khayyám dies in 1131 and is buried in the Khayyam Garden at the mausoleum of Imamzadeh Mahruq in Nishapur.
In 1963, the mausoleum of Omar Khayyam was constructed on the site by Hooshang Seyhoun.
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Omar Khayyam, whose full name is Abu al-Fath Omar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyam, gains fame among his Persian contemporaries a mathematician and astronomer.
Well-regarded for his work on algebra, he also contributes to calendar reform.
Dying in 1131, he will gain posthumous fame as a poet for his “Rubaiyat,” although versions of the forms and verses used therein preexist in Persian literature. (The number of its verses that can be attributed to him with certainty is very small.)