A scheme of heaven - Alexander Boxer

'A delightful and utterly fascinating work of intellectual history.' Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with EinsteinDespite a resurgence in popularity, horoscopes are generally considered
to be pseudoscience today - but they were once a cutting-edge scientific
tool. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer
examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the
deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of
our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's
most ambitious
applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis
enterprise
sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from
Ptolemy to
al-Kindi to Kepler.A Scheme of Heaven explores the wonderful subtleties of astrological ideas. Telling the stories of their inventors and most influential exponents, Boxer puts them through their paces using modern data sets - finding that the methods of today's scientists are often uncomfortably close to those of astrology's ancient sages.