I started a personal tradition 43 years ago, on the day I turned three years old, of associating stars with my birthday. On that day, I looked up in the sky, and saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Given that these three stars were bright, and formed a fairly straight line, and given that I was turning three that day, it seemed perfectly obvious that those three stars had been placed there, in the sky, specifically for me — and so, that day, I claimed them as my personal property. (No one has ever accused me of lacking ego, nor self-confidence.)

As a young child, the science that most fascinated me was astronomy. In more recent years, my interest in stars has become more focused on the geometrical figures called stars, or star polygons — and so, now, rather than looking for my birthday stars in the sky, I always use geometry to construct some star, or starlike pattern, based on the number of years I have survived, to date. This is the one for the number 46, my age as of today.