André Berge (1902–1995) was a physician and psychoanalyst who, in addition to his professional work, had published several novels.
Claude attended the École des Roches [fr] near Verneuil-sur-Avre, about 110 km (68 mi) west of Paris.
This famous private school, founded by the sociologist Edmond Demolins in 1899, attracted students from all over France to its innovative educational program.
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.
The symbolic calculus that he discussed in this major paper is a combination of generating functions and Laplace transforms.
He was awarded a doctorate in 1953 for his thesis Sur une théorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, under the supervision of André Lichnerowicz.
[1] In this thesis, he examined games where perfect information is available in which, at each move, there are possibly an infinite number of choices.
In 1952, before the award of his doctorate, Berge was appointed as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
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.
Returning to France from the United States, Berge took up the position of Director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Bjarne Toft writes:[5] In our modern everyday life, we are surrounded and bombarded by (too) beautiful, flawless pictures, sculptures, and designs.
[6] He is particularly remembered for two conjectures on perfect graphs that he made in the early 1960s but were not proved until significantly later: Games were a passion of Claude Berge throughout his life, whether playing them – as in favorites such as chess, backgammon, and Hex – or exploring more theoretical aspects.
Thus, it was natural that Berge quickly followed up on this work with two larger volumes, Théorie des graphes et ses applications and Espaces topologiques, fonctions multivoques.
The first one is a masterpiece, with its unique blend of general theory, theorems – easy and difficult, proofs, examples, applications, diagrams.
It is a personal manifesto of graph theory, rather than a complete description, as attempted in the book by Kőnig.
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?