Jacques Charles François Sturm (September 29, 1803 - December 15, 1855), French mathematician, of German extraction, was born in Geneva.

Originally tutor to the son of Madame de Staël, he resolved, with his school-fellow Colladon , to try his fortune in Paris, and obtained employment on the Bulletin universel. In 1829 he discovered the theorem, regarding the determination of the number of real roots of a numerical equation included between given limits, which bears his name, and in the following year he was appointed professor of mathematics at the College Rollin .

He was chosen a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1836, became répétiteur in 1838, and in 1840 professor in the École Polytechnique, and finally succeeded SD Poisson in the chair of mechanics in the Faculté des Sciences at Paris. His works, Cours d'analyse de l'école polytechnique (1857-1863) and Cours de mécanique de l'école polytechnique (1861), were published after his death at Paris.

He was the co-eponym of the Sturm-Liouville theory with Joseph Liouville. Sturm's theorem is a basic result for proving the existence of real zeroes of functions.

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