← WRITING · CULTURE & MATHEMATICS · 7 MIN READ
From Nishapur to New York: The Curious Journey of Omar Khayyam
A Persian mathematician, a Victorian poet, an American painter—and four lines that shaped how I think about research.
An unexpected encounter at The Met
As I often do on weekends, I was wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without any particular destination in mind. Somehow, I ended up in Gallery 766 of the American Wing, where a painting caught my attention.
There was something strangely familiar about it. The imagery felt Eastern to me, yet the artistic language was unmistakably Western. Curious, I stepped closer to read the description.
It was The Cup of Love (1887), by the American painter Elihu Vedder, inspired by the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám through Edward FitzGerald's nineteenth-century English adaptation. I had walked into the American Wing of a New York museum, only to unexpectedly encounter Persian literary heritage.
How had the poetry of a medieval Persian mathematician found its way into American art? The answer begins with a book nobody wanted.
The book nobody wanted
In 1859, Edward FitzGerald published a slim volume titled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Only 250 copies were printed, and unsold copies ended up in a London bookseller's penny box. Then a scholar named Whitley Stokes helped introduce it to English artists and poets, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Within decades, it was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.
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!
But FitzGerald did not simply translate Khayyam. He reinvented him. He rearranged independent Persian quatrains and sometimes substantially adapted their imagery and meaning, producing a flowing work of Victorian English poetry.
Among its American admirers was Elihu Vedder, who illustrated an elaborate 1884 edition of the Rubáiyát. Three years later he painted The Cup of Love—the painting I encountered at The Met. A Persian poet, an English writer, and an American painter were connected across centuries.
The mathematician behind the poet
Omar Khayyam was born in 1048 in Nishapur, in present-day Iran. During his lifetime he was known primarily as a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. As someone who loves both Persian poetry and mathematics, I find that combination fascinating.
A Persian robāʿi is a self-contained, four-line poem, often rhyming AABA. What I love about the quatrains attributed to Khayyam is how four economical lines can leave you thinking for hours.
You probably know his mathematics already
Remember Pascal's triangle? In Iran, many of us learn it as the Khayyam–Pascal triangle.
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
Khayyam studied binomial expansions and methods for extracting roots centuries before Pascal. The story is older still: scholars in India, China, and Persia studied these patterns in different forms before either man.
His systematic geometric treatment of cubic equations was an even greater achievement. He found solutions using intersections of conic sections, centuries before general algebraic formulas appeared in Renaissance Europe. He also contributed to the astronomical work behind the Jalali calendar.
The mathematician who helped measure time became famous for poems questioning what time and existence actually mean.
The four lines that made me love research
Of all the quatrains attributed to Khayyam, one has always been my favorite. In a way, it explains what I love about research.
قومی متفکرند اندر ره دین
قومی به گمان فتاده در راه یقین
میترسم از آن که بانگ آید روزی
کای بیخبران راه نه آن است و نه این
A loose English rendering:
Some contemplate the path of faith,
Others, through conjecture, believe they have found certainty.
I fear that one day a voice will call:
“O you who do not know, the path is neither this nor that.”
I love the intellectual humility behind these lines. The poem doesn't merely suggest that one group is wrong and another right. It asks a much more unsettling question:
What if everyone is confidently walking down the wrong path? And what if we are among them?
FitzGerald's adaptation in the 1859 edition shifts the emphasis:
Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after a To-morrow stare,
A Muezzín from the Tower of Darkness cries
“Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.”
His version is beautiful, but I find the Persian more compelling. It reminds me how easily our assumptions can become convictions.
In research, we spend months building arguments and proving theorems. A theorem can be rigorous within its assumptions—but did we choose the right assumptions? Are we asking the right question? Does our model describe the world? Those are much less comfortable questions.
The goal of research is not to prove that we were right. It is to discover where we might be wrong—and hopefully get a little closer to understanding something.
There is an important historical complication: the authorship of many quatrains attributed to Khayyam is debated. This poem belongs to the poetic tradition associated with his name; its message has stayed with me regardless.
Back to Gallery 766
A mathematician in eleventh-century Nishapur, a translator in Victorian England, and an American painter were connected by a handful of four-line poems. Nearly a thousand years after Khayyam's birth, I found that connection in a New York museum.
We often think of mathematics, poetry, and art as separate worlds. Khayyam reminds me how artificial those boundaries can be.
I walked into Gallery 766 expecting to discover a piece of art. Instead, I was reminded of a poet whose words have shaped how I think about mathematics, research, and the limits of my own understanding.
A Persian mathematician became a Victorian literary sensation, inspired American art, and somehow found his way back to an Iranian researcher in New York.
Not a bad journey for four lines of poetry.