Thomas Sturm Science

Thomas Sturm is a CNRS research director at LORIA, Nancy, France. He is also a faculty member of Saarland Informatics Campus at Saarland University and affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, both located in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Sturm is the Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics in Computer Science (Birkhäuser) and an associate editor of the Journal of Symbolic Computation (Elsevier).

Habilitation, Universität Passau, Germany, 2005
Dr. rer. nat., Universität Passau, Germany, 2000


ODEbase is a new online repository providing symbolic computation input related to biomodels   More »
REDUCE, including Redlog, has been recognized with the Open Source Excellence award by SourceForge   More »

Short Bio

I studied computer science at the University of Passau, Germany, where I held positions as a researcher and faculty member (Privatdozent) after finishing my studies in 1995. In 2008 I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and moved to the University of Cantabria in Santander. In 2011 I joined the MPI für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany, where I headed a research group for Arithmetic Reasoning. In 2016 I was appointed as a research director at CNRS.

I worked as a visiting researcher at various international institutes and research facilities including SRI International in Menlo Park, Zuse Institute Berlin, Fujitsu Laboratories Japan, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Forschungs­zentrum Jülich.

Research Interests

My research interests span the domains of exact and efficient computation, computer algebra, logic, and formal reasoning. This includes the development of effective quantifier elimination methods and decision procedures for various algebraic theories, their efficient implementation, and their application in the sciences and in engineering.

On the foundational side, I am working on methods from tropical algebra in a liberal sense with strong focus on the real numbers as the domain of interest. My methods are used in SMT solving and in mathematical biology.

On the applied side, one focus is interdisciplinary research on specialized decision methods for the qualitative analysis of dynamic properties of reaction systems in chemistry and systems biology.

Software and Web Platforms

I am the original author and a principal developer of Redlog and a member of the development group of the underlying open source computer algebra system REDUCE.

Redlog is integrated with the interactive computer algebra system REDUCE. It supplements the open-source computer algebra system REDUCE with more than 100 functions on first-order formulas. Redlog has been publicly available since 1995 and is systematically being improved and developed further. The name Redlog stands for REDUCE Logic System.

I am a co-maintainer of ODEbase, a web platform providing high quality symbolic computation input data derived from established existing biomodels.

Some Publications

Algorithmic Reduction of Biological Networks With Multiple Time Scales — 10.1007/s11786-021-00515-2

Parametric Toricity of Steady State Varieties of Reaction Networks — 10.1007/978-3-030-85165-1_18

Positive Solutions of Systems of Signed Parametric Polynomial Inequalities — 10.1007/978-3-319-99639-4_17

Detection of Hopf Bifurcations in Chemical Reaction Networks Using Convex Coordinates — 10.1016/j.jcp.2015.02.050

Verification and Synthesis Using Real Quantifier Elimination — 10.1145/1993886.1993935