William George Horner

William George Horner (1786 to 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster, born in Bristol as the eldest son of a Wesleyan minister. He was educated at Kingswood School near Bristol, became an assistant master there at sixteen and its headmaster four years later, and from 1809 ran his own school, The Classical Seminary, in Bath, where he died. He wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, and also on optics. His most celebrated mathematical paper appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1819, and his contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the name Horner's method. Earlier he was a regular solver of problems in The Ladies' Diary, and he published one of two modes of proof of a problem now known as the Butterfly theorem. The modern zoetrope, under the name Daedaleum in 1834, has also been attributed to him.