Jacques Charles François Sturm
mathematician from Geneva (1803-1855)
Jacques Charles François Sturm (29 September 1803 – 15 December 1855) was a French mathematician, who made a significant addition to equation theory with his work, Sturm's theorem.
Early life
Sturm was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1803. The family of his father, Jean-Henri Sturm, had emigrated from Strasbourg around 1760—about 50 years before Charles-François's birth. His mother's name was Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Gremay.
In 1818, he started to follow the lectures of the academy of Geneva. The death of his father forced Sturm to give lessons to children of the rich in order to support his own family the following year. In 1823, he became tutor to the son of Madame de Staël.
At the end of that year, Sturm stayed in Paris for a short time following the family of his student. He resolved, with his school-fellow Jean-Daniel Colladon, to try his fortune in Paris, and obtained employment on the Bulletin universel.
Discovery
In 1829, he discovered the theorem that bears his name, and concerns real-root isolation, that is the determination of the number and the localization of the real roots of a polynomial.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacques Charles François Sturm” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.