Claude Lemaréchal is a French applied mathematician, and former senior researcher (directeur de recherche) at INRIA[1] near Grenoble, France.

Lemaréchal and Philip Wolfe pioneered bundle methods of descent for convex minimization.

[2] In 1994, Claude Lemaréchal and Roger J-B Wets were each awarded the George B. Dantzig Prize.

Following Ekeland and Aubin, similar applications of the Shapley–Folkman lemma are described in optimization monographs[7][8] and textbooks.

[9] These developments were catalyzed by Lemaréchal's demonstration that Lagrangian-dual methods were useful on some optimization problems that lacked convexity.