Descartes' rule of signs

In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, described by René Descartes in his La Géométrie, counts the roots of a polynomial by examining sign changes in its coefficients. The number of positive real roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's coefficients (omitting zero coefficients), and the difference between the root count and the sign change count is always even. In particular, when the number of sign changes is zero or one, then there are exactly zero or one positive roots.

A linear fractional transformation of the variable makes it possible to use the rule of signs to count roots in any interval. This is the basic idea of Budan's theorem and the Budan–Fourier theorem. Repeated division of an interval in two results in a set of disjoint intervals, each containing one root, and together listing all the roots. This approach is used in the fastest algorithms today for computer computation of real roots of polynomials (see real-root isolation).

Descartes himself used the transformation x → −x for using his rule for getting information of the number of negative roots.