1079
Jalali Calendar Inaugurated at Isfahan
On the fifteenth of March, Omar Khayyam presented the completed Jalali calendar to Sultan Malik Shah. Five years of nightly observations had yielded a solar year measurement of 365.24219858156 days - accurate to the sixth decimal place, more precise than the Gregorian calendar that would arrive five centuries later. The calendar was immediately adopted across the Seljuk domains; variants of it remain in official use in Iran and Afghanistan to this day.
Su Shi Imprisoned in the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial
The poet Su Shi - Su Dongpo - was arrested on charges that his poems satirized the emperor's reform policies. The so-called Crow Terrace Poetry Trial became a cause célèbre: conservatives saw persecution of genius, reformers saw sedition dressed in verse. Su Shi narrowly escaped execution and was exiled to Huangzhou, where his enforced isolation produced some of the finest poetry and prose in the Chinese literary canon. Exile improved his art.
Birth of Peter Abelard
A Breton minor knight's son was born near Nantes who would grow up to become the most brilliant and abrasive philosopher of his generation, seducing his pupil Heloise, being castrated by her uncle's thugs, and writing logical treatises that pushed scholastic theology toward new rigor in Paris. His letters with Heloise remain the most passionate and intellectually searching love correspondence of the entire Middle Ages.
Omar Khayyam completes the Jalali calendar
Commissioned by Malik Shah, a team of astronomers led by Khayyam produced a new Persian solar calendar of remarkable accuracy, more precise than the Gregorian reform would be five hundred years later. It is still the basis of the Iranian calendar in use today across modern Iran and Afghanistan. The observatory at Isfahan where Khayyam worked also produced important advances in algebra and geometric theory.