The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

-- Omar Khayyam


When I was a young girl my mother framed this and put it over my desk. I memorized it just from having read it so many times. It still moves me.

Ghiyās od-Dīn Abul-Fatah Omār ibn Ibrāhīm Khayyām Nishābūrī (Persian: غیاث الدین ابو الفتح عمر بن ابراهیم خیام نیشابوری) or Omar Khayyam (Nishapur, Persia, May 18, 1048 – December 4, 1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer who lived in Persia. His name is also given as Omar al-Khayyami[1].

He is best known for his poetry, and outside Iran, for the quatrains (rubaiyaas) in Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, popularized through Edward Fitzgerald's re-created translation. His substantial mathematical contributions include his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which gives a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle[2]. He also contributed to calendar reform and may have proposed a heliocentric theory well before Copernicus.