Sometimes it feels as if we are slaves to Outloook & Calendar, meetings, appointments, BT Meet Me audio conferences, webinars, livemeetings, knowledge calls, Telepresence requests, 1-2-1’s, sales deadlines, blah, blah, blah.
I was thinking about the fact of how important the calendar is when it comes to our daily routine but also other key days like the annual performance review, the payment of annual subscriptions, closer to retirement age, etc etc, and I started to think about the mechanics of the annual calendar.

It is incredible to think, it was nearly 1000 years ago, that Persia’s greatest mathematician, astronomer and poet, Omar Khayyam [1048-1131] worked out the solar year. In 1074 AD Omar Khayyam built an observatory in Persia at a location called Ray, as he was asked to develop an accurate solar calendar to be used for tax collection and various local administrative matters. This calendar was way ahead of its time, it is today accurate to within one day in 3770 years. Specifically, Omar Khayyam measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days. It shows that he recognised the importance of accuracy by giving his result to eleven decimal places. In telecoms, the accuracy of data is essential. We take it for granted, our network time (Network Synchronisation) is essential for basically the integrity of all telecommunications.
Omar Khayyam’s work, was done effectively in a time of very limited mathematical knowledge, to put things into context, Sir Issac Newtons “Principia” was published in 1671, the corner stone to modern mathematics, and yet Omar Khayyam was laying the foundations to our calendar 597 years BEFORE our Newton. Next time you are sending out a calendar appointment remember it is based on mathematics from 937 years ago. (approx….)