Google Doodle marks 971st birth anniversary of Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam aka Abu’l Fath Omar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, would have been 971 years today. And Google is celebrating this day with a doodle. Khayyam was born on 18 May 1048, in Iran’s Nishapur.

Khayyam left a permanent mark in three fields. In astronomy, he gave us the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle. While we don't use the Jalali calendar anymore, it became the base of several other calendars.

In the field of mathematics too, Khayyam is known for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations. He was the first to give a general method for solving cubic equations. Besides that, Khayyam also contributed to the functions of a parallel axiom. He also wrote the ‘Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra’. He even discovered a triangular array of binomial theorem the nth root of natural numbers, but the work on this have been lost.