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Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam2.JPG
Born 18 May 1048
Nishapur, Khorasan (present-day Iran)
Died 4 December 1131 (aged 83)
Nishapur, Khorasan (present-day Iran)
Nationality Persian
School Islamic mathematics, Persian poetry, Persian philosophy
Main interests
Mathematics, Astronomy, Avicennism, Poetry

Omar Khayyam (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. He was born 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.

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.

Khayyam seems to have been the first to conceive a general theory of cubic equations and the first to geometrically solve every type of cubic equation, so far as positive roots are concerned. The written work on algebra contains his work on cubic equations. It is divided into three parts: (i) equations which can be solved with compass and straight edge, (ii) equations which can be solved by means of conic sections, and (iii) equations which involve the inverse of the unknown.

The poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam has contributed greatly to his popular fame in the modern period as a direct result of the extreme popularity of the translation of such verses into English by Edward FitzGerald (1859). FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam contains loose translations of quatrains (stanza) from The Bodleian manuscript. It enjoyed so much success that a bibliography compiled in 1929 listed more than 300 separate editions and many more have been published since.

The lunar crater Omar Khayyam was named in his honour in 1970, as was the minor planet 3095 Omarkhayyam discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1980. Omar's life is dramatized in the 1957 film Omar Khayyam.

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Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Omar Jayam para niños

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