William George Horner

William George Horner (1786 to 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster whose place in media history rests on the zoetrope, the spinning drum that shows a loop of drawings as continuous motion. Born in Bristol, the eldest son of a Wesleyan minister, he was educated at Kingswood School, became its headmaster in 1806 and from 1809 ran his own school, The Classical Seminary, in Bath, where he died. He wrote on functional equations, number theory, approximation theory and optics, and Horner's method is named for his work on approximation. His article on the zoetrope appeared in Philosophical Magazine in January 1834, and the modern invention of the device under the name Daedaleum in 1834 has been attributed to him. The source states this as an attribution that has been made, not as a settled first.