Famous People Born with the Sun in Pisces

Set aside the two edge columns of the chart below and the other 28 average 10.8 members each. The second and third, covering the first full days after the Sun's arrival, hold 16 and 18. John Henry Newman, the English cleric and cardinal born February 21, 1801, the page's earliest birth, sits in the third at 2°26′. So do Chuck Palahniuk (American novelist, essayist) and David Foster Wallace (American fiction writer and essayist), both born February 21, 1962, at 2°43′ and 2°35′; the cards use the Sun at local noon, which came hours later in Palahniuk's Pasco, Washington, than in Wallace's Ithaca, New York.

Under a binomial model that pair sits between two and three standard deviations above the interior average, but it was picked after looking, one of 27 neighboring pairs here, so the figure flatters it. The crossing-day rule only removes people: the first and last columns hold six between them because, with the crossing days gone, each keeps only about half a day's births.

Of the 308, 223 arrived between 1940 and 1999, and the 1980s alone supply 15% of the page. The 1970s give 34, fewer than the 1960s (39), the 1950s (37) or the 1990s (36). The step from the 1960s, five people, sits inside one standard deviation for two counts this size, so chance covers it.

Entertainment still leads with 119 members, though the roster as a whole is 42% entertainment. Sports has 59 where the roster's rate gives about 50; Stephen Curry, the American basketball player born March 14, 1988, is one of them and shares Einstein's birthday. Music lands on its expected count: 44 listed, 44.2 predicted.

The entertainment and sports gaps each come to between one and two binomial standard deviations, short of the roughly two a conventional test asks for. They are partly one gap, too, since every extra athlete fills a place an entertainer might have held.

Sampled hour by hour from 1800 through 2009, the Sun spent 8.2% of all moments in Pisces, short of an exact twelfth because Earth, nearest the Sun in early January, still moves faster than average in February and March. That share predicts 316.1 of 3,851 people; the list holds 308 (8%).

That shortfall is under one binomial standard deviation, well within what chance does to a count this size. Readership and the occupations queried, not chance, decide who is listed: entertainment fills 42% of the roster, and that tilt, like birth rates that vary by month, country and era, reaches every sign's count.

The grid runs in demand order: Rob Reiner, the American filmmaker and actor born March 6, 1947, comes first, Albert Einstein, born March 14, 1879, ninth, and Steve Jobs, born February 24, 1955, eleventh. Einstein's and Jobs's cards are two of six built from full chart records, which put the Sun at the birth time each record holds; Jobs's also links to his chart page. Every other card gives the noon Sun for the birthplace, never more than about half a degree from the birth-hour figure.