Jean Berstel (born 1941) is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to combinatorics on words and formal language theory.
Berstel earned his doctorate (doctorat d'État) at Paris Diderot University in 1973.
A festschrift in his honour was published in 2003 as a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science.
[1] Berstel has been a member of the Lothaire group of mathematicians that developed the foundations of combinatorics of words.
He has published several scientific monographs, including Transductions and Context-free Languages (1979),[2] Theory of Codes (1985, jointly with Dominique Perrin),[3] and Codes and Automata (2009; jointly with Dominique Perrin and Christophe Reutenauer)[4] as well as the three Lothaire books.