Descartes' rule of signs
Regla de los signos de Descartes
- Date
- 1637 · confidence high
- Place
- Leiden, Netherlands
- Credited to
- René Descartes
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
René Descartes formulated in 1637, in La Géométrie — an appendix to his Discourse on the Method published in Leiden — the rule that bounds the number of positive and negative roots of a polynomial from the sign changes of its coefficients.
What it led to
- Budan's theorem and the Budan–Fourier theorem
- Real-root isolation algorithms
- Numerical methods for solving polynomials