William George Horner

William George Horner was a British mathematician and schoolmaster, born in Bristol in 1786 and active for most of his working life in Bath. He rose quickly from assistant master to headmaster of Kingswood School, then ran his own private school, and he pursued mathematics alongside his teaching. He wrote on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, and he also published on optics, including a camera lucida paper in 1815 and a Philosophical Magazine article of 1834 on the Daedalum, a spinning-drum motion toy later known as the zoetrope. His best-known mathematical paper, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819, gave its name to Horner's method for approximating roots of equations. Because he died before regular specialist journals existed, his reputation rests on a dispersed body of problems, solutions and papers.