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Risāla fī al-barāhīn ʿalā masāʾil al-jabr wa-al-muqābala

Omar Khayyám

First page of Khayyám's own treatise on algebraic proofs, written in Arabic and preserved in a British Library manuscript.

This manuscript page preserves Khayyám's own mathematical reasoning on algebra, showing his work as a mathematician firsthand.

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Scanned manuscript page in Arabic script on a cream mount within a dark-bound album. A torn-edged, aged sheet of handwritten text in black ink occupies the left-center area, with a title line at the top.
First page of Risāla fī al-barāhīn ʿalā masāʾil al-jabr wa-al-muqābala. British Library: Oriental Manuscripts, IO Islamic 1270, ff 48r-56r, digitised by Qatar Digital Library.

About this source

What it is

This is the first page of a manuscript copy of Khayyám's treatise on algebraic proofs, written in Arabic. It is held in the British Library's Oriental Manuscripts collection and digitised by the Qatar Digital Library.

Why it matters

Khayyám was one of the most important mathematicians of his time, and this treatise deals with solving equations involving unknowns, a field known as algebra and al-muqābala. The survival of this page lets historians study how Khayyám explained mathematical proofs directly, in his own words, rather than through later summaries.

Look closer

  • What details in the handwriting or layout suggest this was copied carefully by a scribe?
  • Why might a mathematical treatise be preserved in a library collection of manuscripts rather than printed?
  • What does the survival of this page tell us about how knowledge traveled before printing?

This document is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Omar Khayyam on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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