John Couch Adams

Adams was born in Laneast, Cornwall in 1819 and trained as a mathematician. Working independently, he calculated the position of an unknown planet to account for Uranus's orbital discrepancies, predictions rooted in Kepler's and Newton's laws. Urbain Le Verrier made identical calculations at the same time, unaware of Adams's work, and sent his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who spotted Neptune on 23 September 1846 within 1° of Le Verrier's mark. The question of who deserved credit sparked controversy that never fully settled. Adams later explained the origin of meteor showers, work that still holds. He became Lowndean Professor at Cambridge in 1859, won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal in 1866, and attended the International Meridian Conference as Britain's delegate in 1884. He died in Cambridge in 1892, his name now on a lunar crater, Neptune's outermost ring, and a prize at Cambridge for the kind of work he did best.