Carl Friedrich Gauss

Six of his ten planets sit in air signs and not one sits in fire. Earth takes three and a single planet sits in water, with four of the ten fixed. Mars sits on the first degree of Libra and Saturn on the last, both retrograde, and Pluto nine arcminutes into Aquarius. The record calls Gauss the prince of mathematicians, says he published only what he considered finished, which means he anticipated several fields privately, and adds that he worked out where to find the lost asteroid Ceres and was right.

Six planets in air, in a mathematician, is a balance a reader will want to mean something, and air is the element of abstraction, comparison and what gets circulated. The first two of those are a fair description of the trade. The third is the one the record contradicts, because a man who published only finished work and kept whole fields to himself was doing the opposite of circulating. The count is real and it half fits, which is worth saying rather than rounding up.

Mars sits in easy contact with Pluto at over half a degree, and the reading is power under command: strategic effort, and strength that does not need to be demonstrated. For a mathematician who anticipated several fields and told nobody, strength that does not need to be demonstrated is as near as this chart comes to the record's own second sentence, and it is a reading about temperament rather than about mathematics. Mars also sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at under a quarter of a degree, the closest contact here, effort that pays: well-timed action, and the ability to commit fully without agonising.

The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at under three quarters of a degree, the self obscured, and in quiet contact with Uranus at a degree and a tenth, independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual. The Moon's sign is certain at seven degrees of Aquarius, which handles a feeling by stepping back to examine it. Mars, Saturn and Neptune were the three retrograde planets. The last fact in that record deserves a sentence of its own on a page like this one: he worked out where to look for a lost asteroid and was right. That is a prediction about where a body in the sky would be, made from calculation and then checked against the sky itself, and it is a different activity from everything else written above. He died at Gottingen on 23 February 1855, at seventy seven. Mars stood sixty degrees from his natal Mercury at eight hundredths of a degree that day and Saturn conjunct his natal Uranus at fifteen hundredths. The Moon was a crescent at forty seven per cent, a phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.