Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell (1855–1916) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into the prominent Lowell family — his siblings included the Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell and the poet Amy Lowell — and graduated from Harvard in 1876 with distinction in mathematics. From 1883 he spent roughly a decade largely travelling in East Asia, serving at one point as foreign secretary and counselor to the first Korean diplomatic mission to the United States, and wrote three books on Japan and Korea, including The Soul of the Far East (1888). Turning to astronomy in his late thirties, he founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894 to study Mars, whose apparent "canals" he championed, controversially, as evidence of intelligent life. His calculations from irregularities in Uranus's orbit predicted an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune; the search he set in motion found Pluto in 1930, fourteen years after his death.