TEHRAN – Thursday marked the day of great Persian poet, astronomer, writer, and mathematician Omar Khayyam.
Khayyam was born in 1048 in Nishapur in northeastern Iran, and spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers in the period which witnessed the First Crusade.
A literal translation of the name Khayyam means ‘tent maker’ and this may have been the trade of his father, Ibrahim.
The political events of the 11th century played a major role in the course of Khayyam’s life.
Khayyam studied science, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy in Nishapur, and in 1068, he traveled to Bukhara, where he frequented the renowned library of Ark.
He was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer, who wrote several works including Problems of Arithmetic, a book on music and one on algebra before he was 25 years old.
During the reign of Sultan Malik-Shah I, he was invited to Isfahan to set up an observatory and revise the Persian calendar.
The resulted calendar was named in Malik-Shah’s honor as the Jalali calendar and inaugurated on March 15, 1079. The Jalali calendar was a true solar calendar where the duration of each month is equal to the time of the passage of the Sun across the corresponding sign of the Zodiac.
The calendar was used until the 20th century in Iran and became the official national calendar of Qajar Iran in 1911. It was simplified in 1925 and the names of the months were modernized, resulting in the modern Iranian calendar.
He was later invited by the new Sultan Sanjar to Marv, a great center of Islamic learning, where Khayyam wrote further works on mathematics.
‘A commentary on the difficulties concerning the postulates of Euclid’s Elements’, ‘On the division of a quadrant of a circle’ and ‘On proofs for problems concerning Algebra’ are among his surviving mathematical works.
Outside the world of mathematics and astronomy, Khayyam is also best known as a result of Edward Fitzgerald’s popular translation in 1859 of nearly 600 short four-line poems, the Rubaiyat.
The poems celebrated the pleasures of life while illuminating the nuanced political and religious context in which they were created. Of all the verses, the best known is the following:
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.
He considered himself intellectually to be a student of Avicenna. There are six philosophical papers believed to have been written by Khayyam. Philosophy, jurisprudence, history, mathematics, medicine, and astronomy are among the subjects mastered by this brilliant man.