1811-1877

French Mathematician and Astronomer

Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier was born in St. Lô France in 1811. Little is known about his early life, but he studied briefly in the lab of famous chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) prior to settling on celestial mechanics as a field of study. By the age of 25 he had been appointed as an astronomer and professor at the Polytechnique and, in 1846, was admitted to the French Academy.

Leverrier is best known for his work leading to the discovery of Neptune in 1846, a discovery he shares with John Couch Adams (1819-1892) and Johann Gottfried Galle (1812-1910). Like Adams and others, Leverrier was intrigued by the fact that Uranus's orbit did not match predictions based on accepted laws of physics. Solving the problem some time after Adams did, Leverrier published his results first. He approached a number of French astronomers...