A Scheme of Heaven

Alexander Boxer

'A delightful and utterly fascinating work of intellectual history.' Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with Einstein

Despite 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.

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