Mathematics
1048 to 1131, Nishapur, Persia (present-day Iran)
The astronomer who cut cones to solve cubic equations and reformed the calendar, now remembered in the West for quatrains whose authorship is genuinely uncertain.
Start learning Omar →Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Proofs of Problems of Algebra (c. 1070): the first systematic classification of cubic equations and a geometric solution for every type, found by intersecting conic sections - togeth…
In 1079 Khayyam led the astronomers of the Isfahan observatory in reforming the Persian calendar for Sultan Malik-Shah. The resulting Jalali calendar, built on precise solar observation, was by many reckonings more accu…
In his Commentary on the Difficulties in the Postulates of Euclid (1077), Khayyam tried to prove Euclid’s troublesome fifth postulate. Studying a special quadrilateral - now called the Khayyam-Saccheri quadrilater…
In the second part of his Euclid commentary, Khayyam reexamined the theory of ratios in Book V of the Elements and pressed a revolutionary idea: that a ratio - even between incommensurable magnitudes - is itself a kind…
The quatrains traditionally attributed to Khayyam - made famous in the West by Edward FitzGerald’s free 1859 adaptation - voice a philosophy of carpe diem, doubt, and the limits of knowledge. They reveal a tension…
More in Mathematics
EuclidPythagorasAl-KhwarizmiAlan TuringGottfried LeibnizAryabhataHypatia of AlexandriaBrahmaguptaepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.