Omar Khayyam Commissioned to Build Isfahan Observatory

1074

Sultan Malik Shah summoned the mathematician Omar Khayyam to Isfahan with an extraordinary mandate: build an observatory, assemble a team of astronomers, and reform the Persian calendar. Khayyam gathered eight scholars and began five years of painstaking measurement - tracking the sun's path with instruments of unprecedented precision. The work would culminate in the Jalali calendar, whose measurement of the solar year was accurate to within seconds of modern values.