Minggatu

Minggatu, full name Sharavyn Myangat and also known as Ming Antu, was a Mongolian astronomer, mathematician and topographic scientist at the Qing court, born about 1692 and dead about 1763. He was born in the Plain White Banner of Inner Mongolia, of the Sharaid clan, and appears in Chinese records in 1713 as a student of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, where Jesuit missionaries were in charge of calendar reform. He worked at the Imperial Observatory from 1724 to 1759, took part in editing important astronomical books, and in 1756 helped survey Xinjiang for the first scientific atlas of China. His main work, The Quick Method for Obtaining the Precise Ratio of Division of a Circle, finished by his son and students after his death, made him the first person in Inner Mongolia to calculate infinite series, with more than ten formulae, and in the 1730s he first established the Catalan numbers; his series expansions were reached algebraically without calculus. The minor planet 28242 Mingantu is named after him.