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Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131)
Omar Khayyam was one of the greatest scientific and literary minds during the flowering of Islamic Persian culture. He was born Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami in Nishapur, in northeastern Iran, where he later studied philosophy. Many believe he came from a family of tent makers, as that is the literal translation of the family name. Khayyam lived in a time of great change and political upheavel. The Seljuk Turks invaded the Middle East and conquered Iran just before Khayyam was born. He was at the height of his career when the First Crusade attempted to dislodge the Seljuks from the Levant. Throughout his life the entire Muslim world struggled to establish an orthodox Islamic state, with much rivalry between conflicting religious and political factions. Learning and academic work were difficult in this environment, as censorship was rife and patronage difficult to find among leaders whose careers were often short-lived. Yet despite these difficulties Khayyam, an accomplished mathematician and prolific scholar, managed to write numerous treatises on arithmetic, music and algebra before he was 25 years old. In 1070 he relocated to the city of Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan, where under the patronage of jurist Abu Tahir he produced his best known mathematical study, Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra. Khayyam proved to be well ahead of his time, as his theories on the solving of cubic equations through the use of rectangular hyperboles and conic sections took over 700 years to prove. In 1073 Khayyam accepted an invitation from the Seljuk ruler Malik-Shah and his vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, to come to the capital at Esfahan and establish an observatory. Over the next nineteen years he made observations and calculations which measured the year as being 365.24219858156 days, a measurement of remarkable accuracy which also anticipated the discovery that Earth's revolutionary period around the Sun in fact gradually lengthens over time. These calculations were made in accordance with Malik-Shah's plans to institute a new calendar, to be known as the Jalali Era. The new calendar was formally instituted on 15 March in 1079. As Khayyam was working on further corrections to the calendar reform in 1092, al-Mulk was murdered by members of the Assassins sect, and Malik-Shah died a month later. Malik-Shah was succeeded by his wife, who had a long-standing grudge against al-Mulk and disliked anyone al-Mulk counted among his friends, including Khayyam. She was also influenced in her decisions by orthodox Muslim clerics who disliked the questioning minds of Khayyam and his colleagues. All funding for the observatory ceased. In an attempt to regain favor and funding, Khayyam wrote a history of Iran's previous rulers which emphasized their patronage of the arts and sciences. When Sanjar, Malik-Shah's third son, took control of the Seljuk Empire in 1118 and relocated the capital to Merv, Omar Khayyam relocated there as well, and continued his studies in mathematics as Sanjar continued his father's scientific and cultural patronage. During this time he wrote a commentary on the works of Euclid which inadvertantly contributed to the evolution of non-Euclidian geometry, and also wrote a now lost treatise on the Pascal triangle. Despite his many contributions to mathematics and astronomy, Omar Khayyam is today known to most people for The Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrain poems first translated into English and popularized in the West by Edward Fitzgerald. Although many scholars now doubt that many of the poems in the collection are Khayyam's actual work, note the many liberties Fitzgerald took in translating the poems, and consider later translations by Robert Graves and Ali-Shah to be superior, for others Fitzgerald's translation remains the definitive work and it was for a time a de rigeur item for any proper literary collection. (A custom printed copy of The Rubaiyat, with gold and jewel-adorned cover, was among the treasures which went down with the Titanic.) Among those poems believed to be in fact Khayyam's work are songs written in praise of the beautiful young wine boys, a common poetic form of his time known as mudhakkarat. Outside Links: Omar Khayyam at FreeWisdom.Org Biography of Omar Khayyam by Edward J. Fitzgerald Internet Classics Archive: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Medieval Sourcebook: The Rubaiyat Omar Khayyam and the Skeptical Tradition Against Islam Encyclopedia of the Orient: Omar Khayyam
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Entry added 8 May, 2004
