Omar Khayyam, << OH mahr ky YAHM >> (1048-1131), was a Persian poet, astronomer, and mathematician. He was famous during his lifetime for his reform of the Islamic calendar. About 100 years after his death, collections of poems appeared bearing his name. These poems express religious skepticism and a rather world-weary hedonism (love of pleasure). The verses show a mind acutely conscious of human ignorance and of the brevity of life. A collection called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia first attracted attention in the West in 1859, when English writer Edward FitzGerald published his free translation of a number of the stanzas arranged as a continuous poem.
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Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, in what is now northwestern Iran. His name, which probably reflects an ancestor’s trade, means the tentmaker.
See also Rubaiyat; FitzGerald, Edward.
