Suppose a monic real quartic polynomial has no nonnegative real zero and its real part on the imaginary axis is everywhere positive. For sufficiently large , its image of the quarter-circle arc from to , closed by the straight chord from to , has winding number one: compare with on the arc and its constant image on the chord. The rest of the actual sector boundary maps into the right half-plane, so its replacement by that chord preserves the winding number. The argument principle then counts exactly one root in the open first quadrant, including multiplicity.