1) #GoogleDoodle today is on #Persian Polymath, philosopher, & poet #OmarKhayyam to celebrate his 971st birthday.

This is second time that #Google dedicated a Doodle to him. In 2012 too, #Khayyam’s 964th birthday was also celebrated by the search engine with a special #doodle

2) Here is from my PhD Dissertation:

A contemporary of #Ghazali, #OmarKhayyam was one of the most versatile scholars of the time, simultaneously a polymath, philosopher and a poet.

3) #OmarKhayyam can be regarded as a successor of al-Farabi and al-Biruni, in the line of argument although he is more famous for his #Rubaiyat (Quatrain).

4) Dejected with the suffocating academic environment, he quietly toiled and penned al-Risalah fi’l-kawn wa’l-taklif (Treatise on the Realm of Existence and Human Responsibility).

5) Although he made clear that he accepted revelation and basic quest of mysticism, he had turned bitter as his poems bordered on antagonism, particularly those he wrote towards old age.

6) In one of his quatrain, #Khayyam says:

If I'm drunk on forbidden wine, so I am!
And if I'm an unbeliever, a pagan or idolater, so I am!
Every sect has its own suspicions of me,
I myself am just what I am.

7) In another quatrain, he directly attacked the literalist scholars of Islam:

Oh Canon Jurists, we work better than you,
With all this drunkenness, we're more sober:
You drink men's blood; we, the vine's.
Be honest - which of us is more bloodthirsty?

8) Born in Nishapur in northeastern Iran, Khayyam spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers in the period which witnessed the First Crusade.

9) #Khayyam's 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.

10) #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.

END of THREAD