Persian poet and mathematician, author of the Rubáiyát
An eleventh-century Persian, at once a first-rate mathematician and astronomer and a poet handed down to later ages. His quatrain collection, the Rubáiyát, is famous for its wine, roses, and sighs over fleeting time, urging one to cherish the present and face the brevity and emptiness of life. Brought to the West in the nineteenth century through the free English rendering of the poet FitzGerald, it swept the age, carrying this Eastern sage’s voice across eight hundred years and around the world. He too was a polymath straddling the two worlds of poetry and science.
Omar Khayyam wrote verses of seizing the day — "come, fill the cup" — while in the observatory he directed a reform of the calendar of remarkable precision, and made pioneering contributions to algebra. Poet and scientist, these seemingly contradictory identities sat easily in him: to him, questioning the courses of the stars and sighing over the brevity of life were but one and the same curiosity about the world.
Among the quatrains under Khayyam’s name, the true authorship of a good many is in doubt, and scholars long debate "which are really his"; this site states the dispute.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.