G.H. Hardy

Fire and earth take four of his ten planets each, with a single one apiece in air and water. The Moon, Mars and Jupiter fill twelve degrees of Sagittarius, the sign that measures a thing by how far it got from where it started. The record is one line: Hardy was an English mathematician who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge.

The Moon sits conjunct Mars at just over half a degree and its sign is certain. The reading is emotion acting immediately: protectiveness, courage on behalf of other people, and a temper that arrives and departs faster than anybody else has adjusted to it. In a record whose single fact is bringing somebody else across the world and into an institution, the first two of those are doing all of the work. Jupiter sits a fifth of the way round from Saturn at just under half a degree, which is growth that holds: sound judgement about risk, and a career that accumulates rather than spikes. Fetching an unknown clerk from Madras was a judgement about risk.

A T-square closes on the Sun, Uranus and Pluto without an outlet, and Uranus sits square that Pluto at just over a fifth of a degree, which is the tightest pairing here but belongs to a whole cohort rather than to him. Venus sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at a fifth of a degree and conjunct Mercury at just under a degree and a half. Mercury and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. The record gives one act and one institution, and a chart whose only closed figure has no outlet is a fair enough instrument for a scholar the record places at a university and nowhere else.

He died at Cambridge on 1 December 1947, at seventy. Transiting Saturn worked two of the three points of his T-square that day, square his natal Pluto at four hundredths of a degree and conjunct his natal Uranus at under a fifth, while Pluto sat in easy contact with his natal Moon at just over a tenth. Jupiter and the Sun both squared his natal Saturn, at a third of a degree and four tenths. The Moon was full and eighty seven per cent lit. That is the phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.