John Couch Adams

It’s the birthday of John Couch Adams, who was born in 1819 in Laneast, Cornwall. Adams went to Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1843 at the top of the university’s mathematics class. As an undergraduate, Adams learned that Uranus’s orbit deviated from prediction, possibly because of the perturbing influence of another, as-yet unknown planet. He resolved to solve the problem using only mathematics and Newton’s laws. By the autumn of 1845, he had predicted where the perturbing planet would be and tried to get astronomers -- notably George Airy of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and James Challis of the Cambridge Observatory -- to test the prediction. Airy and Challis began to look for the planet only after they heard that French astronomer Urban Le Verrier had made the same prediction as Adams. Too late. Using Le Verrier’s prediction, Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory discovered Neptune on 23 September 1846.

Date in History: 5 June 1819