The Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur who gave medieval algebra its high point — a systematic classification and geometric solution of cubic equations using intersecting conic sections — and who led the reform of the Persian calendar under the Seljuks, yet who is known in the West chiefly as the poet of the Rubaiyat, a fame that rests on quatrains of uncertain attribution and on Edward FitzGerald's loose 1859 English version.
In his own lifetime, Omar Khayyam was famous as a mathematician and astronomer. He found geometric solutions to whole classes of cubic equations by slicing cones, and he was a leading figure in building a Persian calendar of extraordinary accuracy, often compared favorably with the one most of the world uses today. In his own time he was admired above all as a mathematician and astronomer, not as a poet. Yet in the English-speaking world he is remembered for none of that. He is the man of wine and roses, of "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou," the skeptic who shrugged at heaven and told us to seize the day. That Khayyam is half a real medieval Persian and half a Victorian invention, built on verses he may never have written and on one translator's beautiful, unfaithful poem.