His full name is Giyas al-Din Fath ibn Ibrahim Omar Khayyam Nishapuri.
Omar Khayyam was a world-famous classic of Persian-Tajik poetry, scientist, mathematician, astronomer, poet and philosopher. The creative work of Omar Khayyam is a remarkable phenomenon in the cultural history of Central Asia, Iran and the whole of humanity. His discoveries in physics, mathematics and astronomy have been translated into many languages and are of historical significance.
Omar Khayyam was 75 years old. He was born in Nishapur in the year 1048. He studied in Nishapur and then in the greatest scientific centres of the time: Balkh, Samarkand, etc. Around 1069, Omar Khayyam wrote a treatise “On the Proof of the Problems of Algebra and Allukabala” in Samarkand. In 1074 he directed the largest astronomical observatory in Isfahan.
In 1077 he completed a book entitled “Commentary on Difficult Postulates of the Book of Euclid”. In 1079, he and his associates introduced the calendar. In the last years of the 11th century, the ruler of Isfahan changed and closed the observatory. Omar Khayyam undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1097 he worked as a doctor in Khorasan and wrote a treatise in Farsi “On the Universality of Being”.
Khayyam spends the last 10-15 years of his life very secluded in Nishapuri, has little contact with people and reads a lot. According to historians, Omar Khayyam read the “Book of Healing” by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in the last hours of his life. He reached the “On Unity and Universality” section of the philosophical work, stuck a toothpick in the book, stood up, prayed and died.
The creative work of Omar Khayyam is a remarkable phenomenon in the cultural history of the peoples of Central Asia and Iran, and of humanity as a whole. His discoveries in physics, mathematics and astronomy have been translated into many languages of the world. His poems “stinging like a snake” continue to captivate with their extreme conciseness, brevity, pictoriality, simplicity of imagery and flexible rhythm.
Omar Khayyam’s philosophy brings him close to the humanists of the Renaissance (“We are the goal of the Creator and the pinnacle of creation”). He hated and denounced the existing order, religious dogmas and the vices of society. However, Khayyam often fell into the pessimism and fanaticism that was prevalent in the Middle Ages and especially in the East. The world was seen as temporary and fleeting. The theologians and philosophers of the time held that eternal life and bliss could only be found after death.
All this could only be reflected in the work of Omar Khayyam. But the poet also loved real life, protested against its imperfections and called for enjoying every moment, even though the existing mores and religion did not share and persecuted such views of life.
The Rubai of Omar Khayyam is a classic of medieval oriental poetry that continues to attract all lovers of the wise word.
The book is a classic of medieval Eastern poetry that still attracts all lovers of the wisdom of the word.
The well-known mathematical results of Khayyam belong to three directions: Algebra, Parallel Theory, Relation Theory and Number Theory. In all these areas, Khayyam had outstanding predecessors and successors in the lands of Islam. In many ways he drew from the classics of Greek and Hellenistic science – Aristotle, Euclid, etc. – but at the same time he is a brilliant representative of the new mathematics with its powerful and determining computational-algorithmic component.
Khayyam was followed by Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi in the theory of relations and the doctrine of number. In Europe, the unified concept of a real (positive and negative) number was developed by S. Stevin at the end of the 16th century. A series of works by 17th century mathematicians is dedicated to the criticism of the theory of relations in the V. The main role in the development of the idea of a real number was played by R. Descartes and J. Newton, who defined number as an abstract ratio of any quantity to a unit quantity of the same kind.
Thus, the works of the mathematicians of the Islamic countries, including the work of Omar Khayyam, are essential links in the chain of research leading to rigorous number theory and the mathematical analysis based on it.
