Sturm, Jacques Charles François

Born Sept. 29, 1803, in Geneva; died Dec. 18,1855, in Paris. French mathematician. Member of the Académie des Sciences (1836); foreign corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1836).

In 1840, Sturm became a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His principal works deal with the solution of boundary value problems of the equations of mathematical physics and the associated problem of finding the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for ordinary differential equations. He gave a general method for determining the number of roots of an algebraic equation that lies on a given interval. Sturm also contributed papers on optics and mechanics.