Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics. As an astronomer, he composed a calendar which proved to be a more accurate computation of time than that proposed five centuries later by Pope Gregory XIII. Omar was born in Nishapur, in northeastern Iran. He spent most of his life near the court of the Karakhanid and Seljuq rulers in the period which witnessed the First Crusade. There is a tradition of attributing poetry to Omar Khayyam, written in the form of quatrains. This poetry became widely known to the English-reading world due to the translation by Edward FitzGerald (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859), which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle. Edward FitzGerald (1809 - 1883) was an English poet and writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The writing of his name as both FitzGerald and Fitzgerald is seen. The use here of FitzGerald conforms with that of his own publications, anthologies such as Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse and most reference books up until about the 1960s.