Background
Le Verrier was born at Saint-Lô, Manche, France, on March 11, 1811.
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Le Verrier was born at Saint-Lô, Manche, France, on March 11, 1811.
He entered the highly competitive école Polytechnique to prepare for a career as a professional scientist. His early interest was in chemistry.
When the teaching post in astronomy fell vacant at the Polytechnique in 1837, Leverrier took it and thereby entered the discipline in which he was to spend the rest of his life.
The aspect of astronomy with which Leverrier was primarily concerned was celestial mechanics, the mathematical analysis of the planetary motions. According to the principles of celestial mechanics, each planet was supposed to move around the sun in an essentially elliptical orbit with minor deviations due to attractions by the rest of the planets. The computations involved were very complicated, but the results were generally sufficient to provide predictions of considerable accuracy. There was, however, one prominent exception—the planet Uranus. Although it had been the subject of a great deal of study since its discovery in 1781, attempts to reduce its motion to rule had yet to meet with complete success. The remaining error was small by ordinary standards (1 minute of arc, or the angle subtended by a nickel at a distance of 100 yards), but it was a scandal in a profession accustomed to accounting for angles less than one-tenth that size.
In 1845 Leverrier decided to look into the question. After concluding that the difficulty was probably due to the action of an unknown planet whose effects were not being taken into account, he undertook a series of detailed calculations which culminated in an estimation of the location of the unknown planet. On September 23, 1846, the planet, later named Neptune at Leverrier's suggestion, was discovered by J. G. Galle, the director of the Berlin Observatory, less than a degree from the spot indicated by Leverrier.
Leverrier's work was universally acclaimed as one of the outstanding scientific achievements of all time, and he received honors from virtually every country and scientific society in Europe. He embarked on similar but less successful investigations of a slight anomaly in the motion of Mercury which was resolved only in the 20th century through the work of Albert Einstein. Leverrier continued with exhaustive examinations and revisions of all the existing planetary theories. In addition, he served with distinction as director of the Paris Observatory, organized the French meteorological service, and worked for the inclusion of scientific instruction in the French educational system. He died in Paris on September 23, 1877.
Le Verrier's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
Quotations: "This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities. "
In 1846, Le Verrier became a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1855, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
