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The man known in English as the poet Omar Khayyám (1048 - 1122) was born in Nishapur (or Naishapur) in Khorassan, Persia (now Iran), and named Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (al-Khayyami means "the tentmaker"). He was famous during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer who figured out how to correct the Persian calendar. On March 15, 1079 Sultan Jalal al-Din Malekshah Saljuqi (1072-1092) put Omar's corrected calendar into effect, as in Europe Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. had put the one Sosigenes had corrected into effect, and as Pope Gregory XIII in February 1552 would put the one Aloysius Lilius had corrected into effect (although Britain would not switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar until 1751, and Russia would not switch until 1918).

Omar Khayyám is famous today, not for his scientific accomplishments, however, but for his literary ones: about a thousand four-line verses he is believed to have written. About a hundred of them were translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) and published as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (rubáiyát means "quatrains"). Other people have also published translations of some of the verses, but Fitzgerald's is the best known. Perhaps the most famous of the verses (Quatrain XII, Fitzgerald's Fifth Edition ) is:

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness--

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"

Another well-known verse (Fizgerald's LI) is:

"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."

Like Shakespeare's works, Omar Khayyám's verses have provided later authors with quotations to use as titles: The title of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar comes from one of the Tentmaker's quatrains (Fitzgerald's XVIII), for example. Eugene O'Neill's drama "Ah, Wilderness!" derives its title from the first quoted verse above.

Omar's life is dramatized in the 1957 film Omar Khayyam starring Cornel Wilde, Debra Page, Raymond Massey, Michael Rennie, and John Derek.