He was a Persian mathematician, astrologer, and poet who lived about 900 years ago. He wrote a major treatise on algebra, he was appointed by the Shah of Persia to reform the calendar, but most famously he wrote a number of poems celebrating the pleasures

This brilliant Persian polymath from the 11th and 12th centuries is a fascinating figure whose fame rests on two very different achievements. In the scientific world, Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath 'Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami was a titan. He penned one of the most important treatises on algebra of the medieval period, making groundbreaking progress on cubic equations. As an astronomer, he was commissioned by Sultan Malik-Shah I to lead the reform of the Persian calendar. The resulting Jalali calendar was a model of astronomical precision, more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that would be developed in Europe 500 years later.

Despite his immense scientific contributions, he is best known in the Western world for his poetry. A collection of his quatrains (four-line verses) was gathered into a volume known as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. These poems often explore themes of skepticism, mortality, and the importance of enjoying the pleasures of life, like wine and love, in the face of an uncertain fate. The collection gained immense popularity in the English-speaking world after Edward FitzGerald's evocative, rather than literal, translation was published in 1859, cementing