Horner, William George

William George Horner, (born 1786, near Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died Sept. 22, 1837, Grosvenor Place, Bath, Somerset), mathematician whose name is attached to Horner’s method, a means of continuous approximation to determine the solutions of algebraic equations of any degree.

Horner became assistant master of Kingswood School, Bristol, in 1802, and headmaster four years later. He founded his own school at Grosvenor Place in 1809. Horner’s method was known to the Chinese in the 13th century (see Zhu Shijie), and in 1804, fifteen years before Horner published his discovery in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Paolo Ruffini won the gold medal of the Italian Science Society for describing a similar method. Horner’s name became attached to the method, and it became very popular in England and America, largely as a result of the publicity of Horner’s work by the British mathematician Augustus De Morgan.