Ada Lovelace

Six of the ten planets sit in fire signs, three in water and a single one in air, with none at all in earth. The Sun, Mercury, Uranus and Neptune spread across nineteen degrees of Sagittarius. Nothing in this chart was retrograde. The record says Lovelace wrote what is generally taken to be the first algorithm intended for a machine, in notes appended to a translation about Babbage's Analytical Engine, and that the notes are three times the length of the paper.

Saturn sits sixty degrees from Uranus at under four fifths of a degree, and the reading is practical innovation: new ideas that are actually built, and an unusual patience for slow change. The machine in that record was never built. The notes about it were written anyway, at three times the length of the thing they were appended to, and actually built is the one phrase in the reading the record flatly contradicts, which is a more interesting result than agreement would have been.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Saturn at a fifth of a degree, the closest contact here, and that is sustained effort: craftsmanship, training, and the rare ability to work at something for years. For a mathematician whose surviving contribution is a set of notes longer than the paper they annotate, sustained effort is the plainest reading available and the record is unusually good evidence for it. One planet in air, with six in fire, is the balance to hold against it: a chart arranged to start things rather than to abstract them, belonging to somebody whose work was entirely abstraction.

Venus sits conjunct Jupiter at three quarters of a degree, generous taste, and Mars in quiet contact with Pluto at half a degree, power under command: strategic effort, and strength that does not need to be demonstrated. The Moon sits on the fifth degree of Aries at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out. Lovelace died in London on 27 November 1852, at thirty six, in the city of birth. Mars stood in easy contact with its own natal place at two hundredths of a degree that day, which reaches the planet both of the chart's closest pairings run through, and the Moon was full and one hundred per cent lit.