Colin Conrad Adams (born October 13, 1956) is an American mathematician primarily working in the areas of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot theory.

His dissertation was titled "Hyperbolic Structures on Link Complements" and was supervised by James Cannon.

Among his earliest contributions is his theorem that the Gieseking manifold is the unique cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold of smallest volume.

Adams is known for his clever use of such arguments utilizing horoball patterns and his work would be used in the later proof by Chun Cao and G. Robert Meyerhoff that the smallest cusped orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds are precisely the figure-eight knot complement and its sibling manifold.

In 1998, Adams received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.