John Couch Adams: From Senior Wrangler to the Quest for an Unknown Planet

As Eugene Bouvard’s attempts stalled to successfully revise his uncle’s Tables of Uranus, a young British mathematician, John Couch Adams, became interested in the problem of Uranus. As an undergraduate at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Adams achieved enormous academic success, including becoming Senior Wrangler and First Smith’s Prizeman. Though he was kept extremely busy with his college work, and could not afford any significant distractions, in June 1841, he became intrigued by the problem of Uranus’s wayward motions, and interested in finding out to what extent the hypothesis of an exterior planet could furnish a solution. The Cambridge mathematics curriculum helped him to develop the world-class expertise he needed to tackle this high-level problem in analysis.