John von Neumann

This is an unusually even chart. Fire and earth take two of his ten planets each and air and water three each, with four cardinal, three fixed and three mutable, so there is no absence anywhere in it and no concentration either. It holds one yod, made of the Moon, Venus and Pluto. The record says von Neumann contributed foundationally to quantum mechanics, game theory, computer architecture and the hydrogen bomb, and that colleagues who were themselves geniuses described him as a different kind of thing.

A chart spread this evenly is worth a sentence because of what it cannot do. There is no missing element to lead on, no stellium, and nothing for a reading to lean its weight against. A record listing four unrelated fields is spread out in a similar way, and the temptation is to call that a match. It is not one. It is two kinds of evenness with nothing connecting them, and a chart with no features cannot explain a career with four.

The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at under a third of a degree, and the reading is growth without much friction: opportunity that arrives through being well thought of, and an easy faith that things will work out. The record's second sentence is precisely about being well thought of, by people in a position to judge, which makes this the one contact here with evidence behind it. The Moon lies at an awkward angle to Venus at nine hundredths of a degree, the closest in the chart, what soothes a person and what attracts them disagreeing, and its sign is certain at twenty one degrees of Aries.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Neptune at just over a degree, the self obscured: confusion about direction, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason, which sits oddly against a record of four completed bodies of work. A yod closes on Pluto using the Moon and Venus, so the chart's tightest pairing is also one side of its only closed figure. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Washington on 8 February 1957, at fifty three. Saturn stood sixty degrees from his natal Mars at under a quarter of a degree that day and the transiting Sun in easy contact with his natal Pluto at three tenths. The Moon was at its first quarter and fifty eight per cent lit.