Did Omar Khayyam Really Write the Rubaiyat? The Mathematician Behind the Famous Quatrains

Probably only a little of it, and nobody can say exactly which part. Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher whose scientific work is well documented, but the poems that made him world-famous are a different story. Hundreds of quatrains, or rubāʿiyāt, were attached to his name over the centuries, and scholars disagree sharply about how many are genuine: estimates range from about 14 to 178. What we can say with confidence is that a brilliant scientist lived in Nishapur in the eleventh century, that some short poems circulated under his name soon after his death, and that a Victorian Englishman turned a selection of them into one of the best-selling poems in the English language.

A scientist from Nishapur

Khayyam was born on 18 May 1048 in Nishapur, in the region of Khorasan in what was then the Seljuk Empire. Modern scholars fix that exact date using a horoscope recorded by the medieval biographer Bayhaqi. He studied in his home town, then moved to Bukhara around 1068 and to Samarkand around 1070, where a local patron supported him while he began a major book on algebra.

In 1074 he entered the service of the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I, at the invitation of the powerful grand vizier Nizam al-Mulk. For almost twenty years he worked close to the centre of an empire that stretched across much of western Asia, with the money and the instruments that serious astronomy required.

The man who solved cubic equations with circles and curves

Khayyam's Treatise on Algebra, most likely completed in 1079, is the work that secures his place in the history of mathematics. He seems to have been the first person to conceive a general theory of cubic equations, the kind that contain a term like x³. He identified fourteen types of cubics that cannot be reduced to simpler equations and solved every type with a positive root geometrically, by finding where two conic sections, such as a circle and a parabola, intersect.

What he could not do was find a purely arithmetic formula for those solutions, and he said so openly, writing that possibly someone else would come to know it after him. He was right: that problem was solved in sixteenth-century Italy by mathematicians including del Ferro, Tartaglia and Cardano.

Questioning Euclid

In December 1077 Khayyam completed a commentary on the difficulties in the postulates of Euclid's Elements. The famous fifth postulate, about parallel lines, had bothered mathematicians for centuries because it seemed less obvious than the others. Khayyam studied a four-sided figure whose top angles could, in principle, be acute, obtuse or right angles. He was the first to consider all three cases, showed that the parallel postulate follows from the right-angle case, and rejected the other two as contradictory.

Today we know that those "rejected" cases correspond to hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, the non-Euclidean geometries of the nineteenth century. Through later commentators the line of argument reached Europe, where the Italian Giovanni Saccheri took it up in 1733, which is why the figure now carries Saccheri's name rather than Khayyam's.

A calendar more accurate than ours

In 1074–75 Malik-Shah commissioned Khayyam to build an observatory in Isfahan and to reform the Persian calendar, working with a panel of eight scholars. Khayyam measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a figure the Wikipedia article calls outstandingly accurate.

The result was the Jalali calendar, named after the sultan and inaugurated on 15 March 1079. It used a 33-year cycle of 25 ordinary years and 8 leap years. It remained in use across Greater Iran into the twentieth century and is the basis of the modern Persian calendar. By the article's comparison, it drifts by about one day in 5,000 years, while the Gregorian calendar used in most of the world drifts by about one day in 3,330 years.

Falling from favour

In 1092 Malik-Shah died, and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk was murdered in the same year, a killing usually blamed on the group known as the Assassins. The observatory fell out of use and Khayyam lost his patrons. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca; one medieval writer, al-Qifti, claimed he did this to prove his piety after being accused of impiety, while Bayhaqi described him as a devout and orthodox man.

Later he was invited to Marv by Sultan Sanjar, possibly as a court astrologer, before returning to Nishapur in poor health. He died there on 4 December 1131, aged 83. A popular story says three schoolfellows, Khayyam, Nizam al-Mulk and the Assassin leader Hassan-i Sabbah, made a pact as boys; it is best treated as a later legend rather than documented history.

The authorship puzzle

The first known reference to Khayyam as a poet comes from Imad al-Din al-Isfahani in 1174, who describes him as both poet and scientist. Early writers quote only a handful of quatrains: one around 1160, two around 1230. An anthology from 1340 includes thirteen. By 1460 a manuscript copied in Shiraz, now in Oxford's Bodleian Library, contains 158. The pattern is clear: the further we get from Khayyam's lifetime, the more poems carry his name.

That is why many specialists are cautious. The Orientalist E. G. Browne wrote in 1906 that it was hardly possible to say Khayyam wrote any particular quatrain, with rare exceptions, and the German scholar Hans Heinrich Schaeder went further in 1934, suggesting his name should be struck out of the history of Persian literature altogether. Others accept a small core as authentic. The honest answer is that the "Khayyam" of the poems is partly a real man and partly a tradition, a name that attracted verses about wine, doubt and the shortness of life.

FitzGerald's free translation

In 1859 the English writer Edward FitzGerald published Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 75 quatrains in rhyming verse; only 250 copies were printed and at first it did not sell. From 1861 it was promoted by Whitley Stokes and admired by the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and FitzGerald revised it several times, with 110 quatrains in 1868 and 101 in later editions.

FitzGerald was not trying to be literal. The scholar A. J. Arberry found that only about 40 of the first edition's 75 quatrains loosely translate a single Persian stanza; others combine two or more, and some cannot be traced at all. FitzGerald himself admitted that many quatrains were "mashed together". His most famous lines open with "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough" in the later version, an image of bread, wine and company in a garden.

By the 1880s there were Omar Khayyam Clubs, and a 1929 bibliography listed more than 300 editions. For many English readers, "Omar" became a symbol of pleasure-loving scepticism, a picture shaped as much by FitzGerald as by medieval Persia. Iranian readers, meanwhile, argue about whether the wine is literal or mystical.

How he is remembered

Khayyam's mausoleum in Nishapur, a modern monument designed by Houshang Seyhoun, is a place of pilgrimage for readers of Persian poetry. A lunar crater has been named after him since 1970, and the minor planet 3095 Omarkhayyam was discovered in 1980. Knowing both sides makes him more interesting, not less.

Learn with Omar Khayyam: English phrases about time and doubt

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to seize the day	to enjoy the present moment	Khayyam's poems tell readers to seize the day.
ahead of his time	having ideas too advanced for one's era	His geometry was centuries ahead of his time.
to take something with a pinch of salt	to doubt something a little	Take "Khayyam quotes" online with a pinch of salt.
lost in translation	changed or weakened by translating	Some meaning is always lost in translation.
to fall out of favour	to lose someone's support	After 1092 he fell out of favour at court.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a famous person whose reputation is partly legend. Use "ahead of his time" and "take it with a pinch of salt".