Claude Berge

Félix François Faure (1841–1899) was Antoinette Faure's father; he was President of France from 1895 to 1899.

This famous private school, founded by the sociologist Edmond Demolins in 1899, attracted students from all over France to its innovative educational program.

At this stage in his life, Claude was unsure about the topic in which he should specialize.

He said in later life:

"I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to do mathematics. There was often a greater urge to study literature."

His love of literature and other non-mathematical subjects never left him and we shall discuss below how they played a large role in his life.

However, he decided to study mathematics at the University of Paris.

After the award of his first degree, he continued to undertake research for his doctorate, advised by André Lichnerowicz.

André Berge (1902–1995) was a physician and psychoanalyst who, in addition to his professional work, had published several novels.

He was the son of René Berge, a mining engineer, and Antoinette Faure.

André Berge married Geneviève in 1924, and Claude was the second of their six children.

His five siblings were Nicole (the eldest), Antoine, Philippe, Edith, and Patrick.

Claude attended the École des Roches near Verneuil-sur-Avre, about 110 km west of Paris.

Berge married Jane Gentaz (born 7 January 1925) on 29 December 1952; they had one child, Delphine, born on 1 March 1964.

Claude Jacques Berge (5 June 1926 – 30 June 2002) was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory.

Claude Berge's parents were André Berge and Geneviève Fourcade.

He began publishing mathematics papers in 1950.

In that year two of his papers appeared, the short paper Sur l'isovalence et la régularité des transformateurs and the major, 30-page paper Sur un nouveau calcul symbolique et ses applications.

The symbolic calculus that he discussed in this major paper is a combination of generating functions and Laplace transforms.

He then applied this symbolic calculus to combinatorial analysis, Bernoulli numbers, difference equations, differential equations, and summability factors.

In 1951 he published a further two short papers, Sur l'inversion des transformateurs and Sur une théorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, that announced various results that would be discussed fully in his thesis.

In 1952, before the award of his doctorate, Berge was appointed as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Beginning in 1952 he was a research assistant at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and from 1957 to 1964 he was a professor at the Institute of Statistics at the University of Paris.

He was awarded a doctorate in 1953 for his thesis Sur une théorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, under the supervision of André Lichnerowicz.

In this thesis, he examined games where perfect information is available in which, at each move, there are possibly an infinite number of choices.

The games are not necessarily finite, with indefinite continuation being allowed.

Berge examined the properties of such games with a thorough analysis.

A 55-page paper based on his thesis, and with the same title, was published in 1953.

In 1957 he spent time in the United States as a visiting professor at Princeton University.

He took part in the Economics Research Project there, which was under contract with the Office of Naval Research.

While in Princeton he undertook work that was presented in the paper "Two theorems in graph theory" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

This was one of his first papers on graph theory, his earlier work being on the theory of games and combinatorics.

He was writing his famous book Théorie des graphes et ses applications (Graph theory and applications) at this time and had just published his book on the theory of games, Théorie générale des jeux à n personnes (General theory of games with n players) (1957).

Returning to France from the United States, Berge took up the position of Director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.

Also, in 1957 he was appointed as a professor in the Institute of Statistics of the University of Paris.

He held visiting positions at Princeton University in 1957, Pennsylvania State University in 1968, and New York University in 1985, and was a frequent visitor to the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta.

Théorie des graphes et ses applications was published in 1958 and, remarkably, in the following year his third book, Espaces topologiques, fonctions multivoques (Topological Spaces, Multi-Valued Functions), was published.

For a mathematician in their early thirties to publish three major books within as many years is a truly outstanding achievement.

From 1965 to 1967 he directed the International Computing Centre in Rome.

He was also associated with the Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales (CAMS), a research center of École des hautes études en sciences sociales.