Pages

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Between yesterday and tomorrow


Between yesterday and tomorrow

Keep yourself from worries and sorrows
Seize with all your might
This fleeting life
Yesterday is already far
Tomorrow not yet arrived
Be happy for a moment
This moment is your life
Fill the bountiful cup
Life is disgrace
Drunkenness is grace.

Omar Khayyam
***
Omar Khayyam
(May 18, 1048 - December 4, 1122)
Was a Persian polymath: mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and above all poet.

As a poet, he is the most famous poet of the East in the West through various adaptations of his rather small number of quatrains (rubaiyaas) in Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

He has also become established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. Recognized as the author of the most important treatise on algebra before modern times as reflected in his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra giving a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. He also contributed to calendar reform and may have proposed a heliocentric theory well before Copernicus.

His significance as a philosopher and teacher, and his few remaining philosophical works have not received the same attention as have his scientific or poetic writings. Zamakhshari referred to him as "the philosopher of the world". Many sources have also testified that he taught for decades the philosophy of Ibn Sina in Nayshapur where Khayyam lived most of his life, breathed his last, and was buried and where his mausoleum remains today a masterpiece of Iranian architecture visited by many people every yea.