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The man known in English as the poet Omar Khayyám (May 18 1048 - December 4 1131, assumed dates) was born in Nishapur (or Naishapur) in Khorasan, Persia (Iran), and named Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (al-Khayyami means "the tentmaker"). His name in Persian is "عمر خیام".
Omar Khayyam the Mathematician
He was famous during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer who calculated 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 had done in 46 B.C. with the corrections of Sosigenes, and as Pope Gregory XIII would do in February 1552 with Aloysius Lilius' corrected calendar (although Britain would not switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar until 1751, and Russia would not switch until 1918).
He is also well known for inventing the method of solving cubic equations by intercepting a parabola with a circle.
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Omar Khayyam the Writer and Poet
Omar Khayyám is famous today not for his scientific accomplishments, but for his literary works, about a thousand four-line verses he is believed to have written. He is best known for the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the English translations by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883).
Other people have also published translations of some of the rubáiyát (rubáiyát means "quatrains"), but Fitzgerald's are the best known. Translations also exist in languages other than English.
See major article: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
See also: Persian literature
Miscellaneous
Omar's life is dramatized in the 1957 film Omar Khayyam starring Cornel Wilde, Debra Page, Raymond Massey, Michael Rennie, and John Derek.