Abstract
When Omar Khayyam (1050–1123) was young, he and two fellow students, Nizam and Hassan, promised that if one of them became rich, he would share his wealth with the other two. Nizam did become rich, and it was only thanks to Nizam’s money that Omar could give up tentmaking for mathematics. The word ‘khayyam’ means tentmaker.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Anglin, W.S. (1994). Khayyam and the Cubic. In: Mathematics: A Concise History and Philosophy. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0875-4_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0875-4_21
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