Who was Omar Khayyam? Google Doodle honours Iranian mathematician and poet

Today's Google Doodle celebrates Khayyam on what would have been his 971st birthday

Google Doodle has honoured Iranian mathematician, poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam on what would have been his 971st birthday. 

Saturday's Google Doodle is of Iranian mathematician Omar Khayyam on what would have been his 971st birthday.

He is best known for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations. However, he was also a well-known astronomer and poet.

Born on May 18, 1048, Khayyam was born in Nishapur, now in northeastern Iran, and spent of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers.

He was the first to give a general method for solving cubic equations.

While he didn’t consider negative roots, his methods were still suitable to find geometrically all real (positive or negative) roots of cubic questions. He also contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom.

He became known posthumously for his poetry because of a translation of his work in a book titled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.

It consisted of a selection of quatrains attributed to Khayyam, with the book becoming popular in the 1880s throughout the English-speaking world.

As an astronomer, he designed the the Jalali calendar which is still used to this day in some parts of Iran and Afghanistan.

It is a solar calendar with a precise 33-year intercalation cycle and formed the basis for other calendars in the region.

Khayyam's Google Doodle will appear to Google users in Canada, Japan, India, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Iceland Chile, Peru, Sweden and the Middle East and North Africa region.

Here, we look into how doodles from this region deserve to be shown further afield.