Omar Khayyam

In Nishapur, a great city of Khorasan in the Seljuk Empire, Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīshāpūrī entered the world in 1048. Medieval Persian texts usually call him simply Omar Khayyam. The name “Khayyam” means “tent-maker” in Arabic, and it has often been assumed, though not with certainty, that his forebears followed that trade. He lived in an age of courts, libraries, religious learning, and political strain, around the time of the First Crusade, and he moved through it as a Persian poet, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician of unusual range.

Khayyam’s education began in the learned atmosphere of Nishapur. He memorized much of the Quran at a young age and studied religious sciences, Arabic grammar, and literature under Mawlana Qadi Muhammad. He then turned more deeply toward mathematics, astronomy, and cosmological doctrines under Khawjah Abu’l-Hasan al-Anbari, including the study of Ptolemy’s Almagest. His gifts were noticed early. He studied under Imam Muwaffaq Nishaburi, a leading teacher of the Khorasan region, and formed a firm friendship with him. About 1068, after study in Nishapur, Khayyam traveled to Bukhara, where he made use of the library of the Ark. Around 1070 he moved to Samarkand and began composing his famous Treatise on Algebra under the patronage of Abu Tahir Abd al-Rahman ibn ʿAlaq.

During his own lifetime, Khayyam was famous above all as a mathematician. He was the first to provide a general solution for all third-degree polynomials by using the intersection of two conic sections, a method later often attributed to Descartes. His surviving mathematical works include a commentary on difficulties in Euclid’s Elements, completed in December 1077, a treatise on the division of a quadrant of a circle, and the Treatise on Algebra, most likely completed in 1079. He also contributed to the understanding of Euclid’s parallel axiom, and the Khayyam-Saccheri quadrilateral bears his name in recognition of his work on the subject.

His astronomical work brought him into the service of Sultan Malik-Shah I. In 1074, invited through the Grand Vizier Nizam al-Mulk, Khayyam came to Marv and was later commissioned to set up an observatory in Isfahan. There he led scientists in careful observations for a revision of the Persian calendar. By 1079, Khayyam and his colleagues had measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, an accuracy still striking by later comparison. He also designed the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a precise 33-year intercalation cycle, which became the basis for the Persian calendar still in use nearly a millennium later.

After Malik-Shah and his vizier died, Khayyam fell from favor at court. He went on pilgrimage to Mecca, possibly to answer suspicions of skepticism and accusations of unorthodoxy raised by hostile clergy. Later invited by Sultan Sanjar to Marv, perhaps as a court astrologer, he eventually returned to Nishapur because of declining health and seems to have lived as a recluse. He died there in 1131, at the age of 83. To English readers, his name became widely known through quatrains attributed to him, especially after Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Their appeal lies in a mind trained on the heavens and equations, yet alert to human brevity: “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”