---

Omar Khayyam

---

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian polymath — mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet — whose genius resists easy classification. Born in Nishapur, in what is now northeastern Iran, he wrote a landmark treatise on algebra that solved cubic equations geometrically, centuries before comparable work appeared in Europe. As court astronomer to the Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah, he led the reform of the Iranian solar calendar — the Jalālī calendar — whose calculation of the solar year remains more accurate than the Gregorian.

It is his Rubāʿīyyāt — collections of four-line poems — for which he is most widely known in the West, introduced through Edward FitzGerald’s celebrated 1859 free translation. Yet FitzGerald’s version shaped a Khayyam that is partly his own invention: lyrical, fatalist, pleasantly melancholic. The original is sharper. Behind the wine and the desert is a philosopher trained in formal logic, metaphysics, and natural science, working within — and against — the Islamic intellectual tradition of his time.

The Philosophy in Verse series reads each quatrain against Khayyam’s own treatises: a restoration, not merely a translation.

Khayyam’s Quatrains — Philosophical Reflections