'Pierre Frédéric Sarrus' (10 March 1798,
Saint-Affrique - 20 November 1861) was a
French mathematician.
Sarrus was professor at the
University of Strasbourg, France (1826-1856) and member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris (1842).
He is author of several treaties, including one on the solution of numeric equations with multiple unknowns (1842); one on multiple integrals and their integrability conditions; one on the determination of the orbits of the comets. He also discovered a mnemonic rule for solving the determinant of a 3-by-3 matrix, named
Sarrus' scheme, which provides an easy-to-remember method of working out the determinant of a 3-by-3 matrix (as illustrated in "
cross product"). Sarrus also demonstrated the fundamental lemma of the calculus of variations.
Sarrus numbers are
pseudoprimes to base 2.