A ASTROLOGY and THE BIRTH of SCIENCE Boxer, Alexander creator author. text enk 2020 monographic eng

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x, 319 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour) ; 24 cm. 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. general ALEXANDER BOXER Includes bibliographical references and index. Astrology History Science and astrology History 133.509 9781781259634 PPAK 210712 20210712092702.0 eng