William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name (Daedaleum), has been attributed to him.[1][2][3]
The son of the Rev. William Horner, a Wesleyan minister, was born in Bristol. He was educated at Kingswood School, near Bristol, and at the age of sixteen became an assistant master there. In four years he rose to be head master (1806), and in 1809 left to establish a school at Grosvenor Place, Bath, which he kept until he died there 22 September 1837. He left a widow and several children, one of whom, William Horner, carried on the school.
Horner published a mode of solving numerical equations of any degree, now known as Horner's method. According to Augustus De Morgan, he first made it known in a paper read before the Royal Society, 1 July 1819, by Davies Gilbert, headed A New Method of Solving Numerical Equations of all Orders by Continuous Approximation, and published in the Philosophical Transactions for the same year. But this version of the history is comprehensively denied by later historians. De Morgan's advocacy of Horner's priority in discovery led to "Horner's method" being so called in textbooks, but this is a misnomer. Not only did the 1819 paper not contain that method, it appeared in an 1820 paper by Theodore Holdred, being published by Horner only in 1830; and the method was by no means novel, having appeared in the work of the Chinese mathematician Zhu Shijie centuries before, and also in the work of Paolo Ruffini.[4]
The method was republished by Horner in the Ladies' Diary for 1838, and a simpler and more extended version appeared in vol. i. of the Mathematician, 1843.
Horner also published:
A complete edition of Horner's works was promised by Thomas Stephens Davies, but never appeared.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Horner, William George". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.