Perpetuants: a lost treasure

Perpetuant is one of the several concepts invented (in 1882) by J. J. Sylvester in his investigations of covariants for binary forms. It appears in one of the first issues of the American Journal of Mathematics which he had founded a few years before. It is a name which will hardly appear in a mathematical paper of the last 70 years, due to the complex history of invariant theory which was at some time declared dead only to resurrect several decades later. I learned of this word from Gian-Carlo Rota who pronounced it with an enigmatic smile. In this talk I want to explain the concept, a Theorem of Stroh, and some new explicit description.