Background
Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur in May 1048. His father, Ibrahim, may have been a tentmaker (Khayyam means tentmaker).
(This is the first and most famous English translation of ...)
This is the first and most famous English translation of the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. As a work of English literature FitzGerald's version of these poems, originally written in the Persian language, is a high point of the 19th century and has been greatly influential.
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Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur in May 1048. His father, Ibrahim, may have been a tentmaker (Khayyam means tentmaker).
Omar obtained a thorough education in philosophy and mathematics, and at an early age he attained great fame in the latter field.
The Seljuk sultan Jalal-al-Din Malik Shah invited him to collaborate in devising a new calendar, the Jalali or Maliki. Omar spent much of his life teaching philosophy and mathematics, and legends ascribe to him some proficiency in medicine.
The product of the efforts of Omar and his two collaborators was a set of astronomical tables entitled Al-zij al-Malikshahi after their royal patron. Of this there remains only the table of 100 fixed stars, whose latitude is given for the first year of the Maliki era (1075), and some contradictory descriptions of the Maliki calendar. It is clear that this calendar was intended to retain the basic months of the old Sassanian calendar, in which a year consisted of 12 months of 30 days each plus 5 epagomenal days, with an extra month of 30 days intercalated every 120 years. The intercalation of 30 days in 120 years made the year a Julian year, as in the Julian calendar a day is intercalated every 4 years. The Sassanian and Julian calendars are based on a year of 365. 15 days, which is not accurate; Omar and his collaborators devised a modification of the intercalation scheme to overcome this inaccuracy, but the details are obscure.
Omar's work on mathematics is known principally through his commentary on Euclid's Elements and through his treatise On Algebra. In the commentary he is concerned with the foundations of geometry and, in particular, strives to solve the problems of irrational numbers and their relations to rational numbers, in the process very nearly becoming the first to acknowledge irrationals as real numbers; and he examines Euclid's fifth postulate, the "parallel postulate, " which distinguishes Euclidean from non-Euclidean geometry. Omar tried to prove the parallel postulate with only the first four postulates by examining a birectangular quadrilateral. The task was an impossible one, but in the course of his attempted proof Omar recognized the logical results of some forms of non-Euclidean geometry. On Algebr a is a classification of equations with proofs of each, some algebraic but most geometric. The most original part is found in his classification of cubic equations, which, following Archimedes, he solved by means of intersecting conic sections.
Shortly after Omar's death, collections of rubaiyat circulated under his name. These poems consist of 4 lines of 13 syllables each with the rhyme scheme AABA or AAAA; the rhythm within each line is rather free. Rubaiyat had been popular in Persia since the 9th or 10th century as occasional verses extemporaneously recited by all classes of persons; they were used both to express a sort of hedonistic appreciation of life and also Sufi mystical experiences.
Omar's Rubaiyat is known in the West largely through the rather inaccurate paraphrase translation of Edward FitzGerald (1859), which in any case seems to contain a number of non-Khayyamian verses. FitzGerald considerably distorted the original to make it conform to Victorian romanticism; these distortions and the non-Khayyamian verses have led some to believe that Omar was himself a Sufi mystic. Recent discoveries of early-13th-century manuscripts of the Rubaiyat, however, have shown that Omar's poetry follows the other tradition of this form of poetry and celebrates, with humorous skepticism, wit, and poetic skill, the joys of wine and homosexual love.
As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics. Khayyam also contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom. As an astronomer, he designed the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle.
There is a tradition of attributing poetry to Omar Khayyam, written in the form of quatrains. This poetry became widely known to the English-reading world in a translation by Edward FitzGerald (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859), which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.
The Persian Scholar Pavilion, donated in 2009 by Iran at the United Nations office in Vienna, features a statue of Omar Khayyam.
In 1970, a lunar crater, located just beyond the northwestern limb of the Moon, on the far side from the Earth, was named Omar Khayyam, in his honour.
A minor planet, discovered in 1980 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova, has been named ‘3095 Omarkhayyam, after him’.
(This is the first and most famous English translation of ...)
He was a Sufi Muslim and greatly revered Prophet Muhammad. In his philosophical work ‘al-Risālah fil-wujūd’ (Treatise on Being) he wrote that all things come from God. His poems also reveal that he was a thoughtful man, troubled by the uncertainty of life and man’s relationship with his creator.
Quotations:
"Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life."
"The Flower that once has blown forever dies. "
"Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where."
"Don't cry upon you losses
Don't mesure today with tommorows
Don't trust to passed and coming day
Believe in now - and be happy today."
"The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it."
"To be free of belief and unbelief is my religion."
"My friend, let's not think of tomorrow, but let's enjoy this fleeting moment of life."
Quotes from others about the person
"Khayyam measured the length of the year as 365. 24219858156 days. Two comments on this result. Firstly it shows an incredible confidence to attempt to give the result to this degree of accuracy. We know now that the length of the year is changing in the sixth decimal place over a person's lifetime. Secondly it is outstandingly accurate. For comparison the length of the year at the end of the 19th century was 365. 242196 days, while today it is 365. 242190 days."
MacTutor biography by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson.
Although very little is known about Omar Khayyam’s personal life, it is generally believed that he was married and fathered two children; a son and a daughter.
