Omar Khayyam

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"Omar the Tentmaker" and "Khayyam" redirect here. For the 1922 film, see Omar the Tentmaker
(film). For other uses, see Khayyam (disambiguation).

Omar Khayyam
‫ﻋﻤﺮ ﺧﯿﺎم‬

Born 18 May[1] 1048[2]

Nishapur, Khorasan (present-day Iran)

Died 4 December[1] 1131 (aged 83)[2]

Nishapur, Khorasan (present-day Iran)

Nationality Persian
 School Islamic mathematics, Persian poetry, Persian

philosophy

Main Mathematics, Astronomy, Avicennism, Poetry

interests

Influences[show]

Influenced[show]

Omar Khayyam (/ka jɑːm/; Persian: ‫ [ ﻋﻣر ﺧﯾّﺎم‬oːm ː xæj j ːm]; 18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131)
was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet.[3][4] He was born in Nishapur, in
northeastern Iran, and spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanidand Seljuq rulers in the
period which witnessed the First Crusade.
As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic
equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics.[5] Khayyam also
contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom.[6]:284 As an astronomer, he designed the Jalali
calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle.[7][8]:659
There is a tradition of attributing poetry to Omar Khayyam, written in the form
of quatrains (rubā iyāt ‫)رﺑﺎﻋﯾﺎت‬. This poetry became widely known to the English-reading world in a
translation by Edward FitzGerald (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859), which enjoyed great success
in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.

Contents

 1Life
 2Mathematics
o 2.1Theory of parallels
 2.1.1The real number concept
o 2.2Geometric algebra
 2.2.1The solution of cubic equations
o 2.3Binomial theorem and extraction of roots
 3Astronomy
 4Other works
 5Poetry
 6Philosophy
o 6.1Religious views
 7Reception
 8See also
 9Citations
 10References
 11External links
Life[edit]
Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, a leading metropolis in Khorasan during medieval times that
reached its climax of prosperity in the eleventh century under the Seljuq dynasty.[9]:15[10][11] Nishapur
was then religiously a major center of Zoroastrians. It is likely that Khayyam's father was a
Zoroastrian who had converted to Islam.[12]:68 He was born into a family of tent-makers (Khayyam).
His full name, as it appears in the Arabic sources, was Abu’l Fath Omar ibn Ibrāhīm al-
Khayyām.[13] In medieval Persian texts he is usually simply called Omar Khayyām.[14] The
historian Bayhaqi, who was personally acquainted with Omar, provides the full details of his
horoscope: "he was Gemini, the sun and Mercury being in the ascendant[...]".[15]:471 This was used by
modern scholars to establish his date of birth as 18 May 1048.[8]:658
His boyhood was passed in Nishapur.[8]:659 His gifts were recognized by his early tutors who sent him
to study under Imam Muwaffaq Nīshābūrī, the greatest teacher of the Khorasan region who tutored
the children of the highest nobility.[12]:20 In 1073, at the age of twenty-six, he entered the service
of Sultan Malik-Shah I as an adviser. In 1076 Khayyam was invited to Isfahan by the vizier and
political figure Nizam al-Mulk to take advantage of the libraries and centers in learning there. His
years in Isfahan were productive. It was at this time that he began to study the work of Greek
mathematicians Euclid and Apollonius much more closely. But after the death of Malik-Shah and his
vizier (presumably by the Assassins' sect), Omar had fallen from favour at court, and as a result, he
soon set out on his pilgrimage to Mecca. A possible ulterior motive for his pilgrimage reported by Al-
Qifti, is that he was attacked by the clergy for his apparent skepticism. So he decided to perform his
pilgrimage as a way of demonstrating his faith and freeing himself from all suspicion of
unorthodoxy.[12]:29 He was then invited by the new Sultan Sanjar to Marv, possibly to work as a
court astrologer.[1] He was later allowed to return to Nishapur owing to his declining health. Upon his
return, he seemed to have lived the life of a recluse.[16]:99 Khayyam died in 1131, and is buried in
the Khayyam Garden.

Mathematics[edit]

"Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" the first page of two-chaptered manuscript kept in Tehran
University.

Khayyam was famous during his life as a mathematician. His surviving mathematical works
include: A commentary on the difficulties concerning the postulates of Euclid's Elements (Risāla fī
šarḥ mā aškala min muṣādarāt kitāb Uqlīdis, completed in December 1077[4]), On the division of
a quadrant of a circle (Risālah fī qismah rub‘ al-dā’irah, undated but completed prior to the treatise
on algebra[4]), and On proofs for problems concerning Algebra (Maqāla fi l-jabr wa l-muqābala, most
likely completed in 1079[6]:281). He furthermore wrote a treatise on extracting the nth root of natural
numbers, which has been lost.[12]:197
Theory of parallels[edit]
See also: History of non-Euclidean geometry and Parallel postulate
A part of Khayyam's commentary on Euclid's Elements deals with the parallel axiom.[6]:282 The treatise
of Khayyam can be considered the first treatment of the axiom not based on petitio principii, but on a
more intuitive postulate. Khayyam refutes the previous attempts by other mathematicians
to prove the proposition, mainly on grounds that each of them had postulated something that was by
no means easier to admit than the Fifth Postulate itself.[4] Drawing upon Aristotle's views, he rejects
the usage of movement in geometry and therefore dismisses the different attempt by Al-
Haytham.[17][18] Unsatisfied with the failure of mathematicians to prove Euclid's statement from his
other postulates, Omar tried to connect the axiom with the Fourth Postulate, which states that all
right angles are equal to one another.[6]:282
Khayyam was the first to consider the three cases of acute, obtuse, and right angle for the summit
angles of a Khayyam-Saccheri quadrilateral, three cases which are exhaustive and pairwise
mutually exclusive.[6]:283 After proving a number of theorems about them, he proved that the Postulate
V is a consequence of the right angle hypothesis, and refuted the obtuse and acute cases as self-
contradictory.[4]Khayyam's elaborate attempt to prove the parallel postulate was significant for the
further development of geometry, as it clearly shows the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries.
The hypothesis of the acute, obtuse, and that of the right angle are now known to lead respectively
to the non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometryof Gauss-Bolyai-Lobachevsky, to that of Riemannian
geometry, and to Euclidean geometry.[19]
Tusi's commentaries on Khayyam's treatment of parallels made its way to Europe. John Wallis, the
professor of geometry at Oxford, translated Tusi's commentary into Latin. Jesuit
geometrician Girolamo Saccheri, whose work (euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus, 1733) is generally
considered as the first step in the eventual development of non-Euclidean geometry, was familiar
with the work of Wallis. The American historian of mathematics, David Eugene Smith mentions that
Saccheri "used the same lemma as the one of Tusi, even lettering the figure in precisely the same
way and using the lemma for the same purpose". He further says that "Tusi distinctly states that it is
due to Omar Khayyam, and from the text, it seems clear that the latter was his inspirer."[16]:104[20][12]:195
The real number concept[edit]
This treatise on Euclid contains another contribution dealing with the theory of proportions and with
the compounding of ratios. Khayyam discusses the relationship between the concept of ratio and the
concept of number and explicitly raises various theoretical difficulties. In particular, he contributes to
the theoretical study of the concept of irrational number.[4] Displeased with Euclid's definition of equal
ratios, he redefined the concept of a number by the use of a continuous fraction as the means of
expressing a ratio. Rosenfeld and Youschkevitch (1973) argue that "by placing irrational quantities
and numbers on the same operational scale, [Khayyam] began a true revolution in the doctrine of
number." Likewise, it was noted by D. J. Struik that Omar was "on the road to that extension of the
number concept which leads to the notion of the real number."[6]:284
Geometric algebra[edit]
Omar Khayyam's construction of a solution to the cubic x3 + 2x = 2x2 + 2. The intersection point produced by
the circle and the hyperbola determine the desired segment.

Rashed and Vahabzadeh (2000) have argued that because of his thoroughgoing geometrical
approach to algebraic equations, Khayyam can be considered the precursor of Descartes in the
invention of analytic geometry.[21]:248 In The Treatise on the Division of a Quadrant of a
Circle Khayyam applied algebra to geometry. In this work, he devoted himself mainly to investigating
whether it is possible to divide a circular quadrant into two parts such that the line segments
projected from the dividing point to the perpendicular diameters of the circle form a specific ratio. His
solution, in turn, employed several curve constructions that led to equations containing cubic and
quadratic terms.[21]:248
The solution of cubic equations[edit]
Khayyam seems to have been the first to conceive a general theory of cubic equations[22] and the first
to geometrically solve every type of cubic equation, so far as positive roots are concerned.[23] The
treatise on algebra contains his work on cubic equations.[24] It is divided into three parts: (i) equations
which can be solved with compass and straight edge, (ii) equations which can be solved by means
of conic sections, and (iii) equations which involve the inverse of the unknown.[25]
Khayyam produced an exhaustive list of all possible equations involving lines, squares, and
cubes.[26]:43 He considered three binomial equations, nine trinomial equations, and seven tetranomial
equations.[6]:281 For the first and second degree polynomials, he provided numerical solutions by
geometric construction. He concluded that there are fourteen different types of cubics that cannot be
reduced to an equation of a lesser degree.[4] For these he could not accomplish the construction of
his unknown segment with compass and straight edge. He proceeded to present geometric solutions
to all types of cubic equations using the properties of conic sections.[27]:157[6]:281 The prerequisite
lemmas for Khayyam’s geometrical proof include Euclid VI, Prop 13, and Apollonius II, Prop
12.[27]:155 The positive root of a cubic equation was determined as the abscissa of a point of
intersection of two conics, for instance, the intersection of two parabolas, or the intersection of a
parabola and a circle, etc.[28]:141 However, he acknowledged that the arithmetic problem of these
cubics was still unsolved, adding that "possibly someone else will come to know it after us".[27]:158 This
task remained open until the sixteenth century, where algebraic solution of the cubic equation was
found in its generality by Cardano, Del Ferro, and Tartaglia in Renaissance Italy.[6]:282[4]
Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact
that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras are geometric facts which are proved by
propositions five and six of Book two of Elements.
Omar Khayyam[29]
In effect, Khayyam's work is an effort to unify algebra and geometry.[30]:241 This particular geometric
solution of cubic equations has been further investigated by M. Hachtroudi and extended to solving
fourth-degree equations.[31] Although similar methods had appeared sporadically since Menaechmus,
Khayyam's work can be considered the first systematic study and the first exact method of solving
cubic equations.[32] The mathematician Woepcke (1851) who offered translations of Khayyam's
algebra into French praised him for his "power of generalization and his rigorously systematic
procedure."[33]:10
Binomial theorem and extraction of roots[edit]
See also: History of binomial theorem
From the Indians one has methods for obtaining square and cube roots, methods based on knowledge of individual
cases—namely the knowledge of the squares of the nine digits 12, 22, 32 (etc.) and their respective products, i.e. 2 × 3
etc. We have written a treatise on the proof of the validity of those methods and that they satisfy the conditions. In
addition we have increased their types, namely in the form of the determination of the fourth, fifth, sixth roots up to
any desired degree. No one preceded us in this and those proofs are purely arithmetic, founded on the arithmetic
of The Elements.
Omar Khayyam Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra[34]

In his algebraic treatise, Khayyam alludes to a book he had written on the extraction of the th
root of the numbers using a law which he had discovered which did not depend on geometric
figures.[28] This book was most likely titled The difficulties of arithmetic(Moškelāt al-hesāb),[4] and is
not extant. Based on the context, some historians of mathematics such as D. J. Struik, believe that

Omar must have known the formula for the expansion of the binomial , where n is a positive
integer.[6]:282
The case of power 2 is explicitly stated in Euclid's elements and the case of at most
power 3 had been established by Indian mathematicians. Khayyam was the mathematician who
noticed the importance of a general binomial theorem. The argument supporting the claim that
Khayyam had a general binomial theorem is based on his ability to extract roots.[35] The arrangement
of numbers known as Pascal's triangle enables one to write down the coefficients in a binomial
expansion. This triangular array sometimes is known as Omar Khayyam's triangle.[28]