This year is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Kanysh Imantayevich Satbayev, the great son of Kazakh steppe: the first compiler of the school Algebra textbook, the first professional mining engineer among the Kazakh people, an outstanding geologist, founder and first President of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, the first laureate of the State Prize in Kazakhstan, a major science organizer, state and public figure.
The greatness of academician K. Satbayev as a man of high erudition, who possessed encyclopedic knowledge in many fields of science, an outstanding organizer of scientific activity and the attraction of advanced scientific personnel, consists primarily in giving the country an intellectual, scientific development trend that transformed Kazakhstan from enlightened to intellectual scientific and professional society. The steps taken under the leadership of K. Satbayev laid the foundation for today’s innovative and scientific potential possessed by our people, our youth and our country.
By the mid-1930s, Kazakhstan was a literate and enlightened society, but the training of any professional engineering personnel was carried out in the Russia or Uzbekistan, and science was preserve only for visitors from Moscow and Leningrad scientists.
Since 1927, a young professional mining engineer Kanysh Satbayev began his professional activity at the Karsakpaysky copper mine, with no local professional staff, a lack of funding, and the remaining scientific equipment from the British concessionists. After 3 years by the beginning of 1930, scientific evidence were found that several of its separated copper deposits discovered by its group are one large Dzhezkazgan copper deposit, the largest in the world with reserves of at least 2 million tons of copper. Later his first fundamental scientific article “To the Problem of the Great Dzheskazgan”, National Economy of Kazakhstan, 1936, No. 1-2, p. 74-83 was published. It chaned the face of Central Kazakhstan and our country for the next century, the way you see it now. The discovery of Greater Dzhezkazgan was and still stay for young people is an example of a professional, scientific approach to the realization of a practical task. And then in the Karsakpay, village, K. Satbayev followed an exact and scrupulous analysis of scientific facts and artifacts using the best available means of research and analysis thousands of kilometers distance from civilization and throughout the rest of his life.
A stunning sense of individual scientific facts to made an analytical synthesis turned him into a great scientist - “Big Dzhezkazgan is not the only object. Within the Dzhezkazgan region there are quite large reserve iron, iron-manganese ores, which allow to plan the extraction of these ores on a large scale”- this will play a key role in preserving the Union's steel industry during the Second World War.
With the start of financing the development of Dzhezkazgan - the construction of a copper smelting plant, a reservoir and the laying of a railway, prerequisites arose for creating the first higher technical educational institution in the country - the Kazakh Mining - Metallurgical Institute (KazMMI), better known to everyone in the country as Polytech (now the Kazakh National Research Technical University named after K. Satbayev). The institute has become a forge of its own professional personnel, including for the growing mining, metallurgical and geological industry of the country. This vector of professional training of senior engineering personnel provided the country's needs for professionals and became the backbone of the formation of the first Kazakh scientific personnel.
The sequence of K. Satbayev in the formation of the engineering, intellectual and scientific elite of the mining and metallurgical sector is the most important standard of his organizational skills and foresight. Consecutive steps allowed to create the first Kazakh scientific center on the basis of the Institute of Geological Sciences in 1940, then extend it to related areas to create an academic branch of science and later form the first Kazakh National Academy of Sciences in 1946.
Systematic and extensive research using the most advanced technical tools in the vast territory of Central and Eastern Kazakhstan, conducted by scientific groups of Kazakh geologists under the guidance of K. Satbayev, prompted him to analytic systematization of geological maps of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s.
Scientific prediction, extrapolation and forecasting of data using the first systematized metallogenic maps of Kazakhstan made it possible for several decades to successfully discover new rich deposits of metallic ores. Systematization of disparate factual regional data into a single integrated geological map of Central Kazakhstan allowed K. Satbayev to make fundamental and universal scientific statements about the patterns of spatial location.
The main merit of Satbayev to the country and the people of Kazakhstan is his great contribution to the development of geological research. It is well known that the development of the country's largest copper and manganese deposits began under his direct supervision. But most important of all is his role in the qualitative reincarnation of Kazakhstan from an agrarian-educational to an industrial-scientific intellectual country. The contribution of Academician Kanysh Satbayev to the imposition of scientific culture and methodological approaches in science, which are an example for systematized research work for current generations of scientists in Kazakhstan and young people interested in science, is invaluable.
Народное хозяйство Казахстана, 1936
Советская геология, 1957
Известия АН КазССР, 1955
Вестник АН КазССР, 1962