Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit, born in Macerata in 1552, who went to China as a missionary and introduced Chinese scholars to Western mathematics. He entered the Jesuit order in 1571 and studied mathematics and astronomy in Rome under Christopher Clavius. He sailed east in 1577, was ordained in Goa in 1580 and reached Macau in 1582. In China he made a map of the world, began teaching European mathematical ideas to Chinese scholars from 1589, and in 1607 published The First Six Books of Euclid in Chinese, based on the Latin edition of Clavius, which showed Chinese readers the logical construction of Euclid's Elements for the first time. He settled in Beijing in 1601, dressed as a Chinese scholar and known as Li Matou, and lived there until his death in 1610.