John Couch Adams

For other people named John Adams, see John Adams (disambiguation).

John Couch Adams (June 5 1819 – January 21, 1892), was a British mathematician. 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. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to both, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would assist Galle in locating the planet (September 1846); which was found within 1° of its predicted location, a point in Aquarius. (There was, and to some extent still is, some controversy over the apportionment of credit for the discovery; see Discovery of Neptune.)

He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866.

In 1884, he attended the International Meridian Conference as a delegate for Great Britain.

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.

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References

Harrison, H. M (1994). Voyager in time and space: the life of John Couch Adams, Cambridge astronomer. Lewes: Book Guild. ISBN 0863329187.