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Young World
WORLD OF SCIENCE
Poet, mathematician
DR. T.V. PADMA
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One of Omar Khayyam’s major contributions was devising a geometric solution to cubic equations.
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Everybody knows of Omar Khayyam as a poet, and his mathematical contributions have been largely ignored.Omar Khayyam was born in Khurasan, which is part of modern-day Iran. In 1070, he wrote a book on algebra, in which he classified equations according to their degree and also provided techniques for solving quadratic equations (something the ancient Babylonians had also done thousands of years ago). One of his most major contributions was devising a geometric solution to cubic equations. Another important contribution was in geometry, on the theory of proportions, where Omar Khayyam extended the concept of a number to include positive irrational numbers.
Calendar and dates
He was also one of the right learned men charged by Sultan Malik Shah with the task of revising astronomical tables and producing a new calendar. The committee of which he was a part devised a calendar which was far more accurate than the Gregorian calendar which is the one we commonly use today. Unlike the Gregorian calendar, in which there is a leap year every four years excluding century years except for century years divisible by the number 400, Omar Khayyam’s calendar had a leap year in eight out of every 33 years, and much closer to approximating the actual solar year. The Gregorian calendar’s rules for leap years are so easy to forget that some computer programmers who didn’t pay attention to the rules made a mistake and forgot that there was a February 29 in 2000. As a result, many computers didn’t have a February 29 that year. If they had been programmed using Omar Khayyam’s method and following his calendar, perhaps they would not have missed a leap year!
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