Claude Berge

Claude Berge (5 June 1926 – 30 June 2002) was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory. He is particularly remembered for his famous conjectures on perfect graphs and for Berge's lemma, which states that a matching M in a graph G is maximum if and only if there is in G no augmenting path with respect to M. He wrote five books, on game theory (1957), graph theory and its applications (1958), topological spaces (1959), principles of combinatorics (1968) and hypergraphs (1970), each being translated in several languages and becoming a classic.

Berge co-founded the French literary group Oulipo with novelists and other mathematicians in 1960 to create new forms of literature. In this association, he wrote a murder mystery based on a mathematical theorem: Who killed the Duke of Densmore?

He received the EURO X gold medal from the European Association of Operational Research in 1989 and the Euler Prize in 1995.

He was at the Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales (CAMS), a research center of École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton University (1957), New York University (1985) and a frequent visitor to the Indian statistical institute, Calcutta.

References

• Photograph of Claude Berge
• Mathematical works of Claude Berge
• Claude Berge page at University of Montreal (by G. Hahn)
• Obituary by S. Bhogle
• Obituary by V. Chvatal

Persondata
Name	Berge, Claude
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	5 June 1926
Place of birth
Date of death	30 June 2002
Place of death