<P> Supposedly, Adams communicated his work to Challis in mid-September 1845 but there is some controversy as to how . The story and date of this communication only seem to have come to light in a letter from Challis to the Athenaeum dated 17 October 1846 . However, no document was identified until 1904 when Sampson suggested a note in Adams's papers that describes "the New Planet" and is endorsed, in handwriting not Adams's, with the note "Received in September 1845". Though this has often been taken to establish Adams's priority, some historians have disputed its authenticity, on the basis that "the New Planet" was not a term current in 1845, and on the basis that the note is dated only after the fact by someone other than Adams . Further, the results of the calculations are different from those communicated to Airy a few weeks later . Adams certainly gave Challis no detailed calculations and Challis was unimpressed by the description of his method of successively approximating the position of the body, being disinclined to start a laborious observational programme at the observatory, remarking "while the labour was certain, success appeared to be so uncertain ." </P> <P> Meanwhile, Urbain Le Verrier, on November 10, 1845, presented to the Académie des sciences in Paris a memoir on Uranus, showing that the pre-existing theory failed to account for its motion . Unaware of Adams's work, he attempted a similar investigation, and on June 1, 1846, in a second memoir presented to a public meeting of the Académie, gave the position, but not the mass or orbit, of the proposed perturbing body . Le Verrier located Neptune within one degree of its discovery position . </P> <P> Upon receiving in England the news of Le Verrier's June prediction, George Airy immediately recognized the similarity of Le Verrier's and Adams' solutions . Up until that moment, Adams' work had been little more than a curiosity, but independent confirmation from Le Verrier spurred Airy to organize a secret attempt to find the planet . At a July 1846 meeting of the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Observatory, with Challis and Sir John Herschel present, Airy suggested that Challis urgently look for the planet with the Cambridge 11.25 inch equatorial telescope, "in the hope of rescuing the matter from a state which is...almost desperate". The search was begun by a laborious method on 29 July . Adams continued to work on the problem, providing the British team with six solutions in 1845 and 1846 which sent Challis searching the wrong part of the sky . Only after the discovery of Neptune had been announced in Paris and Berlin did it become apparent that Neptune had been observed on August 8 and August 12 but because Challis lacked an up - to - date star - map, it was not recognized as a planet . </P> <P> Le Verrier was unaware that his public confirmation of Adams' private computations had set in motion a British search for the purported planet . On 31 August, Le Verrier presented a third memoir, now giving the mass and orbit of the new body . Having been unsuccessful in his efforts to interest any French astronomer in the problem, Le Verrier finally sent his results by post to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory . Galle received Le Verrier's letter on 23 September and immediately set to work observing in the region suggested by Le Verrier . Galle's student, Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, suggested that a recently drawn chart of the sky, in the region of Le Verrier's predicted location, could be compared with the current sky to seek the displacement characteristic of a planet, as opposed to a stationary star . </P>

Why do we say that neptune was the first planet to be discovered through the use of mathematics