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William Horner's father, also named William Horner, was from Ireland where from 1770 he travelled round preaching. John Wesley, a founder of Methodism, encouraged William Horner senior to come to England and join the Methodist Society as a minister. At this time Methodists were members of the Church of England, the break coming later in 1795.
William junior, the subject of this biography, was educated at
Kingswood School Bristol. At the almost unbelievable age of 14 he became an
assistant master at Kingswood school in 1800 and headmaster four years later. He
left Bristol and founded his own school in 1809; The Seminary at 27 Grosvenor
Place in Bath.
Horner is largely remembered only for the method, Horner's
method, of solving algebraic equations ascribed to him by Augustus
De Morgan and others.
At first sight, Horner's plagiarism seems like direct
theft. However, he was apparently of an eccentric and obsessive nature ...
Such a man could easily first persuade himself that a rival method was not
greatly different from his own, and then, by degrees, come to believe that he
himself had invented it. This discussion is somewhat moot because the method was
anticipated in 19th century Europe by Paolo
Ruffini (it won him the gold medal offered by the Italian Mathematical
Society for Science who sought improved methods for numerical solutions to
equations), but had, in any case, been considered by Zhu
Shijie in China in the thirteenth century. In the 19th and early
20th centuries, Horner's method had a prominent place in English and
American textbooks on algebra. It is not unreasonable to ask why that should be.
The answer lies simply with De
Morgan who gave Horner's name and method wide coverage in many articles
which he wrote.
Horner made other mathematical contributions, however,
publishing a series of papers on transforming and solving algebraic equations,
and he also applied similar techniques to functional equations. It is also worth
noting that he gave a solution to what has come to be known as the "butterfly
problem" which appeared in The Gentleman's Diary for 1815 [4].
The problem is the following:-
Let M be the midpoint of a chord PQ of a circle,
through which two other chords AB and CD are drawn. Suppose
AD cuts PQ at X and BC cuts PQ at Y.
Prove that M is also the midpoint of XY.
The butterfly problem, whose name becomes clear on looking at
the figure, has led to a wide range of interesting solutions. Finally we mention
that Horner published Natural magic, a familiar exposition of a forgotten
fact in optics (1832).
Neither the date of Horner's marriage nor the name of the woman
he married are known, but it is recorded that they had several children. After
Horner died in his home in Grosvenor Place, Bath, of a stroke in 1837, one of
his sons, also called William, carried on running the school The Seminary in
Bath.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
List of References (7 books/articles) | |
Mathematicians born in the same country |
Cross-references in MacTutor
JOC/EFR © February 2005 Copyright information | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland | ![]() |
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is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Horner.html |