22 Facts About Claude Berge

Claude Jacques Berge was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory.

Andre Berge was a physician and psychoanalyst who, in addition to his professional work, had published several novels.

Claude Berge was the son of Rene Berge, a mining engineer, and Antoinette Faure.

Andre Berge married Genevieve in 1924, and Claude was the second of their six children.

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

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

Claude Berge was awarded a doctorate in 1953 for his thesis Sur une theorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, under the supervision of Andre Lichnerowicz.

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

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

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

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

Claude Berge was writing his famous book Theorie des graphes et ses applications at this time and had just published his book on the theory of games, Theorie generale des jeux a n personnes.

Claude Berge was associated with the Centre d'Analyse et de Mathematique Sociales, a research center of Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales.

Claude Berge 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.

Claude Berge published a survey paper on graph coloring, where he introduced the ideas that soon led to perfect graphs.

In 1994 Claude Berge wrote a 'mathematical' murder mystery for Oulipo.

Claude Berge described his early sculptures, made in part from stones found in the river Seine, in his book Sculptures multipetres.

Claude Berge wrote five books, on game theory, graph theory and its applications, topological spaces, principles of combinatorics and hypergraphs, each being translated in several languages.

Claude Berge is particularly remembered for two conjectures on perfect graphs that he made in the early 1960s but were not proved until significantly later:.

Claude Berge began writing on game theory as early as 1951, spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1957, and the same year produced his first major book, Theorie generale des jeux a n personnes.

Claude Berge co-founded the French literary group Oulipo with novelists and other mathematicians in 1960 to create new forms of literature.

Claude Berge won the EURO Gold Medal from the Association of European Operational Research Societies in 1989, and the inaugural Euler Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications in 1993.