Omar Khayyám (18 May 1048 - 4 December 1131) was an Islamic scholar who was a poet as well as a mathematician. He compiled astronomical tables and contributed to calendar reform and discovered a geometrical method of solving cubic equations by intersecting a parabola with a circle. Omar Khayyám's full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al- Khayyámi. A literal translation of the name al-Khayyámi (or al- Khayyám) means 'tent maker' and this may have been the trade of Ibrahim his father. Khayyám played on the meaning of his own name when he wrote: "Khayyám, who stitched the tents of science,/Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned,/The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,/And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing"!
The political events of the 11th century played a major role in the course of Khayyám's life. The Seljuq Turks were tribes that invaded southwestern Asia in the 11th century and eventually founded an empire that included Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and most of Iran. The Seljuq occupied the grazing grounds of Khorasan and then, between 1038 and 1040, they conquered all of north-eastern Iran. The Seljuq ruler Toghrïl Beg proclaimed himself sultan at Nishapur in 1038 and entered Baghdad in 1055. It was in this difficult unstable military empire, which also had religious problems as it attempted to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which Khayyám grew up. Khayyám studied philosophy at Naishapur and one of his fellow students wrote that he was "... endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers ..."
However, this was not an empire in which those of learning, even those as learned as Khayyám, found life easy unless they had the support of a ruler at one of the many courts. Even such patronage would not provide too much stability since local politics and the fortunes of the local military regime decided who at any one time held power. Khayyám himself described the difficulties for men of learning during this period in the introduction to his "Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra" -- "I was unable to devote myself to the learning of this algebra and the continued concentration upon it, because of obstacles in the vagaries of time which hindered me; for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep, to devote themselves meanwhile to the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who imitate philosophers confuse truth with false, and they do nothing but deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what they know of the sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see a certain person seeking for the right and preferring the truth, doing his best to refute the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, they make a fool of him and mock him".
However Khayyám was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer and, despite the difficulties which he described in this quote, he did write several works including Problems of Arithmetic, a book on music and one on algebra before he was 25 years old. In 1070 he moved to Samarkand in Uzbekistan which is one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. There Khayyám was supported by Abu Tahir, a prominent jurist of Samarkand, and this allowed him to write his most famous algebra work, "Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra", from which we gave the quote above.
Outside the world of mathematics, Khayyám is best known as a result of Edward Fitzgerald's popular translation in 1859 of nearly 600 short four-line poems the Rubaiyat. Khayyám's fame as a poet has caused some to forget his scientific achievements which were much more substantial. Versions of the forms and verses used in the Rubaiyat existed in Persian literature before Khayyám, and only about 120 of the verses can be attributed to him with certainty. 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".
Here I put some immortal verses from Khayyám: "Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life". "The thoughtful soul to solitude retires". "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou". "Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, / Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; / Pass, therefore, not today in vain,/ For it will never come again". "There was a door to which I found no key: / There was the veil through which I might not see". "Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why:/ drink! for you know not why you go, nor where". "When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back". "A hair divides what is false and true". "You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse". "Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went". "The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon,/ Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - is gone".
Born in Nishapur, in northeastern Iran also known as Persia, at a young age he moved to Samarkand and obtained his education there. Afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became 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 (1070), which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. He contributed to a calendar reform.
His significance as a philosopher and teacher, and his few remaining philosophical works, has not received the same attention as his scientific and poetic writings. Al-Zamakhshari referred to him as "the philosopher of the world". He taught the philosophy of Avicenna for decades in Nishapur, where Khayyám was born and buried. His mausoleum there 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 popularisation 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 (1809-1883), 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.
The writer is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.
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