Minggatu

Minggatu (Mongolian script: ; , c. 1692 – c. 1763), full name Sharavyn Myangat , also known as Ming Antu, was a Mongolian astronomer, mathematician, and topographic scientist at the Qing court. His courtesy name was Jing An (静安). and students (among them his most gifted pupil Chen Jihin and an intendant in the minister of finance, Zhang), The Jesuit missionaries' influence can be seen by many traces of European mathematics in his works, including the use of Euclidean notions of continuous proportions, series addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, series reversion, and the binomial theorem. Minggatu's work is remarkable in that expansions in series, trigonometric and logarithmic were apprehended algebraically and inductively without the aid of differential and integral calculus.

In 1742 he participated in the revision of the Compendium of Observational and Computational Astronomy. In 1756, he participated in the surveying of the Dzungar Khanate (renamed Xinjiang), which was incorporated into the Qing Empire by the Qianlong Emperor. It was due to his geographical surveys in Xinjiang that the Complete Atlas of the Empire (the first atlas of China drawn with scientific methods) was finished. The nomination ceremony and traditional meeting were held in Minggatu's hometown in August 2002. More than 500 delegates and 20,000 local residents gathered together to celebrate and a conference on "The Science Contribution of Ming Antu" was held. The Chinese government named Minggatu’s hometown as "Ming Antu Town".