William George Horner

His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation Horner's method, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819.

In four years he rose to be headmaster (1806), but left in 1809, setting up his own school, The Classical Seminary, at Grosvenor Place, Bath, which he kept until he died there 22 September 1837.

Horner's name first appears in the list of solvers of the mathematical problems in The Ladies' Diary: or, Woman's Almanack for 1811, continuing in the successive annual issues until that for 1817.

His record in The Gentleman's Diary: or, Mathematical Repository for this period is similar, including one of two published modes of proof in the volume for 1815 of a problem posed the previous year by Thomas Scurr (d. 1836), now dubbed the Butterfly theorem.

Several contributions pave the way for, or are otherwise related to, his most celebrated mathematical paper, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1819, which was read by title at the closing meeting for the session on 1 July 1819, with Davies Gilbert in the Chair.

[4] While a sequel was read before the Royal Society, publication was declined for Philosophical Transactions, having to await appearance in a sequence of parts in the first two volumes of The Mathematician in the mid-1840s, again largely at the instigation of T. S. Davies.