Gérard Berry

Gérard Philippe Berry (born 25 December 1948) is a French computer scientist elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2002. In the early 1980s he led a joint team from the École des Mines de Paris and INRIA that designed the Esterel synchronous programming language for complex reactive systems, work that became widely used for describing and formally verifying systems whose correctness depends on precise timing, such as digital circuits and safety-critical control software. He served as Director of Research at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, held the Collège de France's Liliane Bettencourt chair of Technological Innovation in 2007 to 2008 and its Informatics and Digital Sciences chair in 2009 to 2010, and received the CNRS Gold Medal, France's highest scientific distinction, in 2014.