John Couch Adams - Later Career

Later Career

Ten years later, George William Hill described a novel and elegant method for attacking the problem of lunar motion. Adams briefly announced his own unpublished work in the same field, which, following a parallel course had confirmed and supplemented Hill's.

Over a period of forty years, he periodically addressed the determination of the constants in Carl Friedrich Gauss's theory of terrestrial magnetism. Again, the calculations involved great labour, and were not published during his lifetime. They were edited by his brother, William Grylls Adams, and appear in the second volume of the collected Scientific Papers. Numerical computation of this kind might almost be described as his pastime. He calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant, perhaps somewhat eccentrically, to 236 decimal places and evaluated the Bernoulli numbers up to the 62nd.

Adams had boundless admiration for Newton and his writings and many of his papers bear the cast of Newton's thought. In 1872, Isaac Newton Wallop, 5th Earl of Portsmouth donated his private collection of Newton's papers to Cambridge University. Adams and G. G. Stokes took on the task or arranging the material, publishing a catalogue in 1888.

The post of Astronomer Royal was offered him in 1881, but he preferred to pursue his peaceful course of teaching and research in Cambridge. He was British delegate to the International Meridian Conference at Washington in 1884, when he also attended the meetings of the British Association at Montreal and of the American Association at Philadelphia.