Thomas Sturm Science

Thomas Sturm is CNRS Research Director at LORIA, Nancy. He is also Associate Faculty at Saarland Informatics Campus, and Associate Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics in Computer Science (Springer Nature) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Symbolic Computation (Elsevier).

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


News

Logic1 version 0.2.0 has been published   More »
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 earned my diploma degree in computer science from the University of Passau in 1995. I then held positions there as a researcher and faculty member (Privatdozent). 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 Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, where I led an Arithmetic Reasoning research group. Since 2016 I have been a Research Director at CNRS.

I have also worked as a visiting researcher at several international institutes and research facilities. These include SRI International in Menlo Park, the Zuse Institute Berlin, Fujitsu Laboratories in 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 work on methods from tropical algebra in a broad sense, with a focus on the real numbers as the domain of interest. These methods aim at SMT solving and at 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 a principal developer of Logic1, a modern Python/Cython-based successor of my estalished system Redlog. Development of Logic1 began in 2023.

First published in 1995, Redlog supplements the open-source computer algebra system REDUCE with more than 100 functions on first-order formulas. The name stands for REDUCE Logic System. I am also a member of the development group of REDUCE.

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