GooG DooD: Omar Khayyam’s 971st Birthday

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Omar Khayyam’s 971st Birthday

Although he was renowned as a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, Omar Khayyam may be best known today for his poetry. Born in Nishapur, Persia (located in modern-day Iran) on this day in 1048, Khayyam is believed to have been the son of a tent-maker, which is the literal meaning of his name, al-Khayyam.

Endowed with a multifaceted mind, he wrote books on music, arithmetic, and algebra before the age of 25. During the Seljuk dynasty, Khayyam was invited to the city of Isfahan to build a new observatory under the sponsorship of sultan Malik-Shah. For 18 years he led a team of scientists that built a star map and measured the length of the solar year so precisely that it loses only one day every 5,000 years—more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, which loses a day every 3,330 years. Using these calculations he helped to develop the Jalali calendar, a forerunner of Iran’s modern calendar.

Many of Khayyám’s insights and ideas were not proven until centuries later. His Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070) remains an essential text to this day, introducing the concept of binomial expansion and offering methods for solving cubic and quadratic equations that merged algebra and geometry by use of conic sections. Khayyam also posited the idea that a cubic equation can have more than one solution.

Though his mathematical breakthroughs are less well known, Khayyam is famous for The Rubáiyát, a collection of hundreds of short poems known as quatrains, which was first translated from Farsi into English in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald. Versions of some of these verses can be found elsewhere in Persian literature, but many were originated by Khayyam.

Happy 971st Birthday, Omar Khayyam!