The French-Swiss mathematician Charles-Francois Sturm was the discoverer of a little known theorem in projective geometry which was the main topic of a memoir dedicated to conic sections and published in two parts in 1826 in Ger-gonne's journal Annales de mathematiques pures et appliquees. Sturm discovered this theorem during his first stay in Paris as tutor to the de Broglie family in 1824. At the beginning of the 19th century, a community of French mathemati-cians had developed the project of organising the whole corpus of geometrical propositions (including famous theorems such as Pascal's) from general prin-ciples. Sturm's original work constituted a part of this project and appeared at a time when debates on questions of rigor and good practice in geometry had animated the community of mathematicians : how to interpret the concept of duality ? How to represent it ? What credence should be given to the contro-versial principle of continuity enunciated by Poncelet ? Furthermore, the new theorem discovered by Sturm appeared in a context of competition and pri-ority debates with other young mathematicians also publishing in Gergonne's journal, such as Plucker or Bobillier. The study of the circulation of Sturm's theorem, which is little studied in the scientific literature, shows how knowl-edge and practices were formed in the particular field of projective geometry in France.
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