Omar Khayyam
Today, Omar Khayyam. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Today, most of us know Omar Khayyam through a book of poems – his Rubaiyat – a selection of poems beautifully rendered into English by British poet Edward Fitzgerald – seen as far better poetry than the original. But: that takes nothing from Omar. His greatness lies, not in those lovely verses, but in his scientific work.
Omar was a Persian polymath born in the late eleventh century – born in an intellectual Golden Age. And his work in mathematics and astronomy was truly significant. The poetry came late in his life. And we read this verse:
Then to this earthen bowl did I adjourn
My Lip to the secret Well of Life to learn
And Lip to Lip it murmur’d – “While you live,
Drink! – for once dead you never shall return!”
So what had Omar learned when he dipped into that well of life?
Possible Persian version of the original poem
This was long after Euclid and his geometry. And long before modern analytic geometry. And his work serves us today by wedding geometry and algebra – like using geometric ideas to help solve cubic equations.
A really stunning accomplishment came in his studies of astronomy. The Shah ordered him to create a group to create an observatory – and to create a more accurate Persian calendar. They went to work and, in the process, gave the length of a year as 365.242 days. That value was accurate to within one second.
But back to aging Omar Khayyam – his turning to poetry and philosophy. Perhaps the most familiar of all his four line quatrain poems is this one:
The Moving Finger writes: and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.
That’s a pretty gloomy view of things. He appears to’ve been a religious agnostic, now seeking answers to the great human questions: fate, mortality ...
Which brings us back the very reason for his fame today. Those quatrains that make up the Rubaiyat. Omar had never put them in one place. They were scattered among many sources. Other writers quoted him – maybe even writing their own, and attributing them to him. So we can’t even be sure that the Rubaiyat is all his.
The west became aware of Omar, some while before Fitzgerald. And earlier poets had made fragmentary translations. None gained any traction. But then Fitzgerald came along and he made no pretense of doing literal translations.
The result? Well, we now have a wonderful body of poetry given us by an Englishman. And we have a great Persian intellect who did so much to advance science. But, as for poetry ... Well, I like to see Omar as having been Edward Fitzgerald’s poetic muse.
Statue of Omar Khayyam in Tehran (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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What turned my attention to Omar was this book: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald’s English Version. Edited by Hossein-Ali Nouri Esfandiary. Shumposha Photo Printing Co. Ltd. Japan, 1976. (It is a beautiful presentation copy, given to me by a colleague on the occasion of my 65th birthday. And it is odd in many ways.
It is beautifully illustrated by Artist Behzad Miniatur with images that he felt better represented life in Omar’s time, than previous ones had. It also includes each quatrain translated into German. This book was, in a way, very instructive since it reveals – I think accidentally – that the true nature of the Rubaiyat remains deliciously clouded.)
I include in the text the original Persian of the first quatrain that I quote. It is from this source and it translates roughly as follows – quite different from Fitzgerald’s rendering of it.
I put my lip to the lip of the jar in utmost longing,
that I might ask it the secret of mysteries.
It placed its lip upon mine and gently said:
Drink wine, for beneath the clay you will sleep long.
To read Fitzgerald’s original work, see Project Gutenberg.
Wikipedia article about Omar Khayyam.
Wikipedia article about the Rubaiyat.
Wikipedia article about Edward FitzGerald
This Episode first aired on July 13, 2026.