Descartes' rule of signs

In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, first described by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie, is a technique for getting information on the number of positive real roots of a polynomial. It asserts that the number of positive roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's coefficients (omitting the zero coefficients), and that the difference between these two numbers is always even. This implies, in particular, that if the number of sign changes is zero or one, then there are exactly zero or one positive roots, respectively.

By a linear fractional transformation of the variable, one may use Descartes' rule of signs for getting a similar information on the number of roots in any interval. This is the basic idea of Budan's theorem and Budan–Fourier theorem. By repeating the division of an interval into two intervals, one gets eventually a list of disjoint intervals containing together all real roots of the polynomial, and containing each exactly one real root. Descartes rule of signs and linear fractional transformations of the variable are, nowadays, the basis of the fastest algorithms 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.