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Wang Zhenyi
Qing woman scholar of Jiangning who taught herself astronomy and mathematics from her grandfather's library, explained lunar eclipses with a lamp-and-mirror model, and died at twenty-nine
On an observatory terrace at night, a large bronze armillary sphere stands on a stone base while two people stand with their backs turned facing the view; stars are joined into constellation lines overhead, and a sundial and tiered dripping water vessels stand at the right.
Also known as Zi Deqing
Wang Zhenyi, courtesy name Deqing, came from Jiangning, with family roots in Tianchang, Anhui. Her grandfather Wang Zhefu, a former prefect of Xuanhua versed in astronomy and mathematics, died in exile in Jilin, leaving more than seventy cases of books. She travelled to Jilin for his funeral as a girl and learned to ride and shoot there, then accompanied her father Wang Xichen through Shaanxi, Hubei and Guangdong, teaching herself astronomy, calendrical mathematics and medicine from her grandfather's library. In an essay on lunar eclipses she set a lamp for the sun, a round mirror for the moon and a round table for the earth to show how eclipses occur, and she wrote simple guides to the calculating methods of Mei Wending and Western rod arithmetic. At twenty-five she married Zhan Mei of Xuancheng, and she died in 1797 aged twenty-nine; her poems and essays were gathered as Collected Writings of the Defeng Pavilion (Defengting chuji). In 1994 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Venus after her.
Life and times
Dates 1768 CE–1797 CE