Jacques Charles François Sturm

Jacques Charles François Sturm was born in Geneva on 29 September 1803 and died in Paris on 18 December 1855. He turned from the humanities to mathematics after his father died when he was sixteen, and was taught at the Geneva Academy by Simon Lhuilier. His best known paper, Mémoire sur la résolution des équations numériques, appeared in 1829 and treated the problem of finding the number of real roots of an equation on a given interval; Hermite wrote that Sturm's theorem immediately became a classic. In papers of 1836 and 1837 written with Joseph Liouville on differential equations arising from the theory of heat, Sturm helped create the Sturm-Liouville problem, an eigenvalue problem for second order differential equations.