Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam was a mathematician first. Born at Nishapur in Persia around 1048, he wrote a treatise solving cubic equations by intersecting conic sections, and worked on the calendar reform that produced the Jalali year, more accurate than the one Europe was using six centuries later. The quatrains came to Europe long after his death in 1131, and they came through Edward FitzGerald, whose Rubaiyat of 1859 is a free reworking rather than a translation and is the reason the name is known in English at all. Scholars have argued ever since about how many of the verses are actually his, since quatrains attached themselves to his name for centuries. The various Rose Gardens, Stanzas and Strophes gathered under his name are editions and rehandlings of that same body of verse. One of them is not his at all: the Gulshan-i Raz, or Secret Rose Garden, was written around 1311 by Mahmud Shabistari, a Sufi poet of Tabriz two centuries later.