His name first appeared in official Chinese records in 1713, among the Kangxi Emperor's retinue, as a shengyuan (state-subsidized student) of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.

He also participated in the work of compiling and editing three very important books in astronomy and joined the team of China's area measurement.

His seminal work The Quick Method for Obtaining the Precise Ratio of Division of a Circle (Chinese: 割圜密率捷法; pinyin: Gēyuán Mìlǜ Jiéfǎ), which was completed after his death by his son Mingshin,[2] and students (among them his most gifted pupil Chen Jihin and an intendant in the minister of finance, Zhang),[3] was a significant contribution to the development of mathematics in China.

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.

[2] In 1910, Japanese mathematician Yoshio Mikami mentioned that Minggatu was the first Mongolian who had ever entered into the field of analytical research methods.