Omar Khayyam
Persian polymath, mathematician, astronomer and poet (1048–1131), born in Nishapur, in present-day Iran, and one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the Islamic Middle Ages, though in the West he is known chiefly for his literary side. In mathematics he made fundamental contributions to the theory of cubic equations, which he systematically classified and solved through geometric constructions using conic sections, an advance not surpassed until modern sixteenth-century algebra; he also worked on the foundations of Euclid's parallel postulate, anticipating ideas that centuries later would lead to non-Euclidean geometries. As an astronomer, he led, at the commission of the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah, the reform of the Persian calendar, producing a solar calendar (the Jalali calendar) of extraordinary astronomical precision, more accurate even than the Gregorian calendar Europe would adopt five hundred years later. In the West, however, his immense fame derives almost exclusively from the Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains (rubaiyat) modern scholarship considers only partly attributable with certainty to Khayyam himself, since the Persian manuscript tradition kept adding many more to it over the centuries. The version that made them world-famous, however, is not a faithful translation but a free and often unfaithful recreation by the Victorian poet Edward FitzGerald (1859), who transformed the work into a hedonistic, sceptical hymn to wine, the fleetingness of life and the enjoyment of the present in the face of uncertainty about the afterlife — a voice that crystallised the popular Western image of Khayyam as an Epicurean philosopher, overshadowing his true stature as one of the great scientists of his age.