The Astronomer Who May Not Have Written His Own Poems

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Omar Khayyam spent his working life as a mathematician and astronomer, reforming the Persian calendar and advancing the algebraic study of cubic equations; poetry, on the evidence that survives from his own lifetime, was not the reputation he was known for. No manuscript in Khayyam's own hand survives, and the earliest surviving quatrains attributed to him were copied down decades, in some cases well over a century, after his death, at a period when it had become a running convention to attach anonymous or unattributed ruba'i to famous names as a kind of literary shorthand. Some scholars accept a core group of quatrains as genuinely his; others treat the entire attributed corpus as a name that accumulated poems over centuries rather than a body of work one poet actually wrote. This is not a settled dispute this entry can resolve in either direction; see the open question below.