Srinivasa Ramanujan

Both lights sit within ten arcminutes of a sign boundary at noon: the Sun nine arcminutes into Capricorn, and the Moon two arcminutes from the end of Pisces. Air and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in fire and earth. The record says Ramanujan was largely self-taught in southern India, that he sent Hardy a letter of results so strange that Hardy said they must be true because nobody would have the imagination to invent them, and that he died at thirty two.

The Moon sitting two arcminutes from a boundary is a problem here rather than a feature, because without a birth time it could be anywhere across thirteen degrees of that day. It is left out, and the cost is the closest contact in the chart, the Sun in hard contact with that Moon at under a fifth of a degree, along with one more. What remains is a loose chart in which nothing at all comes inside four tenths of a degree. For a record that gives a mathematician, a letter to Hardy and an age, the chart was never going to be the larger half of this entry.

The useful contact is a wide one. The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at a degree and a third, and the reading is independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual, and sudden opportunities that suit them. For a mathematician the record describes as largely self-taught, whose results struck Hardy as too strange for anybody to have invented, both halves of that are a fair account of what the record actually contains, and a degree and a third is a wide orb for a fit this close, which is worth stating rather than hiding.

Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at two thirds of a degree, practical innovation: new ideas that are actually built, and an unusual patience for slow change. Mercury sits in quiet contact with Venus at under half a degree, charm in communication: somebody easy to talk to, who negotiates without it feeling like negotiation. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Kumbakonam on 26 April 1920, at thirty two, and the record states that age without explaining it, which is where this entry leaves it as well. The transiting Sun stood in hard contact with his natal Saturn at under a quarter of a degree that day. The Moon was at its first quarter and fifty eight per cent lit.