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Today Google has dedicated a creative and special doodle to Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam on his 971st birthday.

He was best known for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations.

Apart from his maths skills, he was also a well-known astronomer and poet.

Source: Famous People
Source: Round Table Books

Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, a leading metropolis in Khorasan (Present day Iran) during medieval times that reached its climax of prosperity in the eleventh century under the Seljuq dynasty. Nishapur was then religiously a major center of Zoroastrians. It is likely that Khayyam’s father was a Zoroastrian who had converted to Islam. 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. In medieval Persian texts he is usually simply called Omar Khayyām.

His boyhood was passed in Nishapur. 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. 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. He was then invited by the new Sultan Sanjar to Marv, possibly to work as a court astrologer. 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. Khayyam died in 1131 and is buried in the Khayyam Garden.

His work on the classification and solution of cubic equations is phenomenal of those times as he had provided geometric solutions by the intersection of cones.

Khayyam was first to give a general method for solving cubic equations. Although he didn’t consider negative roots, his methods were sufficient to find geometrically all real (positive or negative) roots of cubic equations.

In 2012 as well, Khayyam’s 964th birthday was also celebrated by the search engine with a special doodle which was very well received by users.

Source: The Hindu, Times of India, Wikipedia

 



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