Omar Khayyam is a pastel by Prasenjit Dhar which was uploaded on June 5th, 2012.
Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam (1048-1131),was a Persian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. The greatest such impact was in English-speaking... more
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Title
Omar Khayyam
Artist
Prasenjit Dhar
Medium
Pastel - Dry Pastel On Ivory
Description
Omar Khayyam (1048-1131),was a Persian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. The greatest such impact was in English-speaking countries; the English scholar Thomas Hyde (1636�1703) was the first non-Persian to study him. The most influential of all was Edward FitzGerald (1809�83),[6] who made Khayy�m the most famous poet of the East in the West through his celebrated translation and adaptations of Khayy�m's rather small number of quatrains (Persian: رباعیات rubāʿiyāt) in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Omar Khayyam's full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami. A literal translation of the name al-Khayyami (or al-Khayyam) means 'tent maker' and this may have been the trade of Ibrahim his father. Khayyam played on the meaning of his own name when he wrote:-
Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned,
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!
The political events of the 11th Century played a major role in the course of Khayyam's life. The Seljuq Turks were tribes that invaded southwestern Asia in the 11th Century and eventually founded an empire that included Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and most of Iran. The Seljuq occupied the grazing grounds of Khorasan and then, between 1038 and 1040, they conquered all of north-eastern Iran. The Seljuq ruler Toghrïl Beg proclaimed himself sultan at Nishapur in 1038 and entered Baghdad in 1055. It was in this difficult unstable military empire, which also had religious problems as it attempted to establish an orthodox Muslim state, that Khayyam grew up.
However Khayyam was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer and, despite the difficulties which he described in this quote, he did write several works including Problems of Arithmetic, a book on music and one on algebra before he was 25 years old. In 1070 he moved to Samarkand in Uzbekistan which is one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. There Khayyam was supported by Abu Tahir, a prominent jurist of Samarkand, and this allowed him to write his most famous algebra work, Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra from which we gave the quote above. We shall describe the mathematical contents of this work later in this biography.
Toghril Beg, the founder of the Seljuq dynasty, had made Esfahan the capital of his domains and his grandson Malik-Shah was the ruler of that city from 1073. An invitation was sent to Khayyam from Malik-Shah and from his vizier Nizam al-Mulk asking Khayyam to go to Esfahan to set up an Observatory there. Other leading astronomers were also brought to the Observatory in Esfahan and for 18 years Khayyam led the scientists and produced work of outstanding quality. It was a period of peace during which the political situation allowed Khayyam the opportunity to devote himself entirely to his scholarly work.
During this time Khayyam led work on compiling astronomical tables and he also contributed to calendar reform in 1079
Uploaded
June 5th, 2012
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