Resumo de John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams
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. 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 was Lowndean Professor at the University of Cambridge for 33 years from 1859 to his death. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866. In 1884, he attended the International Meridian Conference as a delegate for 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.
Early lifeHis father, Thomas Adams, was a tenant farmer; his mother, Tabitha Knill Grylls, inherited a small estate at Badharlick. From the village school at Laneast he went, at the age of twelve, to Devonport, where his mother's cousin, the Rev. John Couch Grylls, kept a private school. 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. He graduated B.A. in 1843 as the senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman of his year.
Astronomy
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. Elected fellow of his college in 1843, he at once proceeded to attack the novel problem. 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.On 21 October 1845 he left at Greenwich Observatory, for the information of Sir George Airy, the astronomer-royal, a similar document, still preserved among the archives. A fortnight afterwards Airy wrote asking for information about a point in the solution. 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 investiation. 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.

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