Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Earth, air and water take three of his ten planets each, with a single one in fire, and five of the ten are fixed. Venus, Mars and Saturn fill nine degrees of Taurus. The record says Leibniz invented calculus independently of Newton and lost the priority dispute in England while winning it on notation, which is the one everybody still uses, and that he also worked out binary arithmetic.

This is a thin chart attached to an enormous record, and the gap between them is the thing to say first. Nothing in it comes inside four tenths of a degree, and the tightest contact of all is the Sun in mild friction with Venus, which is the hardest angle those two can ever make and the mildest reading in the whole vocabulary: taste and self-worth slightly out of step. A record containing calculus, a priority dispute and binary arithmetic is not going to be met by that.

What the chart does offer is Jupiter sixty degrees from Saturn at just over two thirds of a degree, growth that holds: sound judgement about risk, and a career that accumulates rather than spikes. For a philosopher and mathematician whose output ran across logic, law, metaphysics and arithmetic, accumulation is the right shape, and it is also a reading that would fit any long working life anywhere. The Moon stands at an awkward angle to Jupiter at seven tenths, emotional overreach, and square Saturn at a degree and a third, need meeting refusal, with its sign certain at sixteen degrees of Aquarius.

The record's middle fact is a dispute about who had something first, settled against him in England and in his favour by everybody who has written a derivative since. That is a question about publication dates and national committees, and there is nothing in ten planets that speaks to it. Uranus and Neptune were the two retrograde planets. He died at Hanover on 14 November 1716, at seventy. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day, and the Moon was new at nought per cent lit, which is as dark as that phase gets.