New Delhi: Google on Saturday dedicated a creative and special doodle to Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam on his 971st birthday. He was best known for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations.
Apart from his mathematics skills, he was also a well-known astronomer, philosopher and poet. Born in 1048 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.
At the age of 22, Khayyam’s reputation spread quickly throughout Persia and established him as a mathematician of the first rank with his most famous algebra work Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra and Balancing.
His 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.
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.
His poetry is better known in the West than any other non-Western poet. He was the writer of more than a thousand ‘Rubaiyat’ or verses. Edward FitzGerald translated his poems, written in four lines, in the 1800’s and published in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Other than English, his poetry is also translated to other languages. One of his most liked verses are the following:
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.
At the age of 83, Omar Khayyam died in his hometown of Nishapur on December 4, 1131.
In 2012 as well, Khayyam’s 964th birthday was also celebrated by the search engine with a special doodle which was very well received by users.
Apart from India, the doodle would also appear to Google users in Russia, the Middle East, North African nations, the US and Chile.
[source_without_link]With inputs from IANS [/source_without_link]