Claude Berge

Claude Jacques Berge (5 June 1926 to 30 June 2002) was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory. The second of six children of the physician and psychoanalyst André Berge, he attended the École des Roches and then studied mathematics at the University of Paris, where his doctoral advisor was André Lichnerowicz. He began publishing in 1950, and his first major paper introduced a new symbolic calculus combining generating functions and Laplace transforms, which he applied to combinatorial analysis, Bernoulli numbers and difference equations. He kept a lifelong love of literature alongside his mathematics.