He was a famous Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher,

He lived in the 11/12th centuries and worked at the court in Eastern Iran.

Many verses (four line quatrains or rubai) have been attributed to him but it is not clear how many of these he actually composed.

One of the earliest established collections of quatrains dates from 1461. This Ouseley manuscript, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, was used by FitzGerald in his translation.

Edward FitzGerald was a wealthy Victorian ‘gentleman of letters’ who lived most of his life in Suffolk, in and around Woodbridge.

A chance meeting with a local young man named Edward Cowell (later a Professor at Cambridge) set FitzGerald on to his Persian studies.

Cowell discovered the Ouseley manuscript of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in the Bodleian Library, and sent a copy to FitzGerald.

This, together with another larger manuscript from Calcutta, provided FitzGerald with the basis for his Rubaiyat.

FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was first published in 1859. It contained 75 quatrains, and was an interpretation not a literal translation of the verses attributed to Khayyam.

After an initial failure, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat became ever more popular, at first in Britain, then in the United States and then in the rest of the world.

The Rubiayat has been translated into over 70 different languages to become the most widely known poem in the world. A new edition has been published almost every year since the 1880’s.

As well as being a beautiful poem, the philosophy of the Rubaiyat seems to have appealed to many people over the years.