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tent judge, declared at a time when he was himself a competitor with 

 Sturm for a place in the Academy, " that impartial posterity would 

 place them by the side of the finest memoirs of La Grange." The first 

 of these two memoirs was presented in 1 833 to the concours for the 

 great prize of Mathematics, to be awarded by the Academy in 1834 

 for the most important discovery in that science made known within 

 the preceding three years. The Academy conferred the prize on 

 Sturm not for the memoir which he had submitted to the judgment 

 of the Commission, but for that which contained his celebrated 

 theorem and which had been presented in 1829. Other memoirs 

 relate to optics, mechanics, pure analysis, and analytical geometry, 

 and embrace the most difficult questions which have been treated in 

 those several branches of science. One of the latest of these was 

 a communication to the Academy on the theory of vision, and is 

 remarkable both for the geometrical and analytical elegance with 

 which many questions subsidiary to the theory are treated in it. It 

 confirms generally, with one important exception relating to the 

 asserted muscularity of the crystalline lens and the changes attri- 

 buted to its action, the views of the late Dr. Thomas Young in his 

 well-known memoir on this subject. 



Sturm visited England in 1841, and gave the mathematicians with 

 whom he conversed a high impression, as well of the extent of his 

 knowledge as of his inventive power. 



The health of M. Sturm, which had previously been remarkably 

 vigorous, began to decline in 1851, probably in consequence of his 

 laborious public employments and the unremitting severity of his 

 studies : he died on the 18th of December last, to the deep regret of a 

 large circle of friends and pupils, to whom he appears to have been 

 singularly endeared by the modesty, truthfulness, and simplicity of 

 his character. "To my eyes," said M. Liouville, in the discourse 

 which he pronounced at his grave, " Sturm was a second Ampere : 

 candid like him, and like him equally indifferent to fortune and the 

 vanities of life : they both of them joined to great inventive powers, 

 an encyclopaedic range of knowledge : neglected and even despised 

 by men of the world and the worshipers of station and power, but 

 exercising an unmistakeable impression upon the youth of our 

 schools, where genius never fails to produce its impression : possess- 



