Alan Turing

Alan Turing is remembered as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, the mind that gave us the Turing machine and cracked the unbreakable. Yet his chart opens a softer door. His Sun sits in Cancer, the father shining through the sign of the mother: a deeply emotional, intuitive, sentimental soul who guards a tender inner world inside a crab's shell, protective and quietly devoted. That Sun lands in his second house of values and self-worth, and it is worth noting how little Britain valued him in his lifetime, since so much of his work lay hidden under the Official Secrets Act. His Moon in Libra is the beautiful, Venusian Moon that finds peace through harmony, fairness and elegance, a psyche forever weighing the scales and hungry for justice, the very justice history denied him after his 1952 prosecution. In the sixth house of daily work and service, that Moon poured itself into meticulous, world-saving labour at Bletchley Park, where his codebreaking helped win the Battle of the Atlantic. A Gemini Ascendant gave him the quicksilver, endlessly curious mask of the messenger, the mind that dabbled from cryptanalysis to the chemistry of morphogenesis. He now graces the Bank of England fifty pound note.