John Couch Adams - Early life, Publications
Astronomer, born in Laneast, Cornwall, SW England, UK. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and in 1843 became fellow and mathematical tutor there. In 1845 he deduced mathematically the existence and location of the planet Neptune, his prediction occurring almost simultaneously with that of the French astronomer, Leverrier. Adams was appointed professor of astronomy at Cambridge in 1858, and was director of the Cambridge Observatory from 1861.
John Couch Adams (June 5, 1819 – January 21, 1892), was a British mathematician and astronomer. Adams was born in Laneast, Cornwall and died in Cambridge.
His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. Le Verrier would assist Galle in locating the planet (September 1846); see Discovery of Neptune.)
He was Lowndean Professor at the University of Cambridge for thirty-three years from 1859 to his death. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866.
A crater on the Moon is jointly named after him, Walter Sydney Adams and Charles Hitchcock Adams. Neptune's outermost known ring and the asteroid 1996 Adams are also named after him. The Adams Prize, presented by the University of Cambridge, commemorates his prediction of the position of Neptune. His personal library is now in the care of Cambridge University Library.
Early life
His father, Thomas Adams, was a tenant farmer; His promise as a mathematician induced his parents to send him to the University of Cambridge, and in October 1839 he entered as a sizar at St John's College. in 1843 as the senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman of his year.
While still an undergraduate he happened to read of certain unexplained irregularities in the motion of the planet Uranus, and determined to investigate them as soon as possible, with a view to ascertaining whether they might not be due to the action of a remote undiscovered planet. It was this: from the observed perturbations of a known planet to deduce by calculation, assuming only Newton's law of gravitation, the mass and orbit of an unknown disturbing body. By September 1845 he obtained his first solution, and handed to Professor James Challis, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, a paper giving the elements of what he described as "the new planet." (Challis would later observe it, but fail to recognize it, despite possessing Adams' paper.)
On 21 October 1845 he left at Greenwich Observatory, for the information of Sir George B. Adams, who thought the query unessential, did not reply, and Airy for some months took no steps to verify by telescopic search the results of the young mathematician's investigation. Meanwhile, Leverrier, on 10 November 1845, presented to the French Academy a memoir on Uranus, showing that the existing theory failed to account for its motion. Unaware of Adams's work, he attempted a like inquiry, and on 1 June 1846, in a second memoir, gave the position, but not the mass or orbit, of the disturbing body whose existence was presumed. The longitude he assigned differed by only 1 degree from that predicted by Adams in the document which Airy possessed. The latter was struck by the coincidence, and mentioned it to the Board of Visitors of the Observatory, Challis and Sir John Herschel being present. Herschel, at the ensuing meeting of the British Association early in September, ventured accordingly to predict that a new planet would shortly be discovered. Meanwhile Airy had in July suggested to Challis that the planet should be sought for with the Cambridge equatorial. On 8 and 12 August, as afterwards appeared, the planet was actually observed; Leverrier, still ignorant of these occurrences, presented on 31 August a third memoir, giving for the first time the mass and orbit of the new body. On the announcement of the fact, Herschel and Challis made known that Adams had already calculated the planet's elements and position. Airy then at length published an account of the circumstances, and Adams's memoir was printed as an appendix to the Nautical Almanac. The new planet, at first called Leverrier by F.
The honour of knighthood was offered to Adams when Queen Victoria visited Cambridge in 1847; In the same year, the members of St John's College commemorated his success by founding in the university an Adams Prize, to be given biennially for the best treatise on a mathematical subject. In 1851 he became president of the Royal Astronomical Society. His lay fellowship at St John's College came to an end in 1852, and the existing statutes did not permit his re-election. But Pembroke College, which possessed greater freedom, elected him in the following year to a lay fellowship, and this he held for the rest of his life. In 1858 he became professor of mathematics at St Andrews, but lectured only for a session, when he vacated the chair for the Lowndean professorship of astronomy and geometry at Cambridge. Two years later he succeeded Challis as director of the Observatory, where he resided until his death.
Although Adams's researches on Neptune were those which attracted widest notice, the work he subsequently performed in relation to gravitational astronomy and terrestrial magnetism was not less remarkable. In the following year his memoir on the secular acceleration of the moon's mean motion partially invalidated Laplace's famous explanation, which had held its place unchallenged for sixty years. At first, Leverrier, Plana and other foreign astronomers controverted Adams's result; For these researches the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him its gold medal in 1866. Using a powerful and elaborate analysis, Adams ascertained that this cluster of meteors, which belongs to the solar system, traverses an elongated ellipse in 33 1/4 years, and is subject to definite perturbations from the larger planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Ten years later, when Mr. G. Hill of Washington expounded a new and beautiful method for dealing with the problem of the lunar motions, Adams briefly announced his own unpublished work in the same field, which, following a parallel course had confirmed and supplemented Hill's. In 1874-1876 he was president of the Royal Astronomical Society for the second time, when it fell to him to present the gold medal of the year to Leverrier. The determination of the constants in Gauss's theory of terrestrial magnetism occupied him at intervals for over forty years. Grylls Adams, and appear in the second volume of the collected Scientific Papers. He laboured for many years at the task of arranging and cataloguing the great collection of Newton's unpublished mathematical writings, presented in 1872 to the university by Lord Portsmouth, and wrote the account of them issued in a volume by the University Press in 1888. The post of Astronomer Royal was offered him in 1881, but he preferred to pursue his peaceful course of teaching and research in Cambridge. Five years later his health gave way, and after a long illness he died at the Cambridge Observatory on 21 January 1892, and was buried in St Giles's cemetery, near his home. His bust, by the same sculptor, stands opposite that of Herschel in the hall of St John's College, Cambridge. Another bust, taken in his youth, belongs to the Royal Astronomical Society.
Publications
The Scientific Papers of John Couch Adams, 4to, vol. (1900), edited by William Grylls Adams and Ralph Allen Sampson, with a memoir by Dr J. Glaisher, were published by the Cambridge University Press. A collection, virtually complete, of Adams's papers regarding the discovery of Neptune was presented by Mrs Adams to the library of St John's College. A description of them by Professor Sampson was inserted in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society (vol.
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