Jean Berstel


Jean Berstel is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to combinatorics on words and formal language theory. He is a currently a professor emeritus at the University of Marne-la-Vallée.

Biography

Berstel earned his doctorate at the Paris Diderot University in 1973. In 1973--1995 he was a professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University, and in 1995--2005 a professor at the University of Marne-la-Vallée, where he is a professor emeritus since 2005.
In 2006, Berstel was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Turku, Finland. A festschrift in his honour was published in 2003 as a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science.

Research contributions

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",
"Theory of Codes", and "Codes and Automata"
as well as the three Lothaire books.