Valérie Berthé

Valérie Berthé (born 16 December 1968)^[1] is a French mathematician who works as a director of research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale (IRIF), a joint project between CNRS and Paris Diderot University. Her research involves symbolic dynamics, combinatorics on words, discrete geometry, numeral systems, tessellations, and fractals.^[2]

Valérie Berthé

Education

Berthé completed her baccalauréat at age 16,^[3] and studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1988 to 1993. She earned a licentiate and master's degree in pure mathematics from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1989, a Diplôme d'études approfondies from University of Paris-Sud in 1991, completed her agrégation in 1992, and was recruited by CNRS in 1993.^[1] Continuing her graduate studies, she defended a doctoral thesis in 1994 at the University of Bordeaux 1. Her dissertation, Fonctions de Carlitz et automates: Entropies conditionnelles was supervised by Jean-Paul Allouche.^[1][4] She completed a habilitation in 1999, again under the supervision of Allouche, at the University of the Mediterranean Aix-Marseille II; her habilitation thesis was Étude arithmétique et dynamique de suites algorithmiques.^[1]

Research

Berthé's research spans the area of symbolic dynamics, combinatorics on words, numeration systems and discrete geometry. She has recently made significant process in the study of S-adic dynamical systems, and also of continued fractions in higher dimensions.^[5][6][7][8]

Associations

Berthé is a vice-president of the Société mathématique de France (SMF), and director of publications for the SMF.^[9] She has played an active role in L'association femmes et mathématiques.^[10] Berthé has also been associated with the M. Lothaire pseudonymous mathematical collaboration on combinatorics on words^[11] and the Pythias Fogg pseudonymous collaboration on substitution systems.^[12]

Recognition

In 2013, Berthé was elevated to the Legion of Honour.^[3][10]