William George Horner

He attended Kingswood School Bristol. At the age of fourteen he became a substitute teacher and four years later, even the director of his school. He left Bristol in 1809 and founded his own school in Bath.

Horner's most important contribution to mathematics was the Horner scheme for the solution of algebraic equations. It was submitted on 1 July 1819, the Royal Society and published in the same year in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. However, Horner was not the first who discovered this method, because it was already five centuries earlier Zhu Shijie known ( and also Paolo Ruffini ). Zhu used for solving equations, a method of conversion, which he called fan fa and the newly rediscovered as Horner Horner scheme.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Horner scheme took an important place in some algebra books. This was mainly due to Augustus De Morgan, who had been treating it under that name in a number of his articles in detail.

Horner was also active in the field of optics: In 1834, he developed the Daedalum or Daedatelum, known as the zoetrope today.