Editing John Couch Adams (section)

==Later career==
[[File:John Couch Adams by Sir Hubert von Herkomer.jpg|right|thumb|Portrait of John Couch Adams by [[Hubert von Herkomer]], {{Circa|1888}}]]
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 Adams briefly announced his own unpublished work in the same field, which, following a parallel course had confirmed and supplemented Hill's.<ref name="eb"/>

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.<ref name="eb"/> He calculated the [[Euler–Mascheroni constant]], perhaps somewhat eccentrically, to 236 [[decimal precision|decimal places]]<ref name="ODNB"/> and evaluated the [[Bernoulli numbers]] up to the 62nd.<ref name="eb"/>

Adams had boundless admiration for Newton and his writings and many of his papers bear the cast of Newton's thought.<ref name="eb"/> 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 of arranging the material, publishing a catalogue in 1888.<ref>{{cite web |title=Introduction to the Newton Manuscripts Catalogue |url=http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=55 |access-date=24 August 2007 |publisher=The [[Newton Project]]}}</ref><ref>''A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers written by or belonging to [[Sir Isaac Newton]], the Scientific Part of which has been Presented by the Earl of Portsmouth to the University of Cambridge, drawn up by the Syndicate appointed 6 November 1982'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888</ref>

The post of [[Astronomer Royal]] was offered him in 1881, but he preferred to pursue his teaching and research in Cambridge. He was British delegate to the [[International Meridian Conference]] at [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]] in 1884, when he also attended the meetings of the British Association at [[Montreal]] and of the American Association at [[Philadelphia]].<ref name="eb"/>