Marcel Berger Remembered Claude LeBrun, Editor and Translator Gérard Besson EDITOR’S NOTE. Claude LeBrun has kindly assembled this memorial for Marcel Berger. This month also Marcel Berger,1 one of the world’s leading differential marks the conference “Riemannian Geometry Past, geometers and a corresponding member of the French Present and Future: An Homage to Marcel Berger” at Academy of Sciences for half a century, passed away on IHÉS. October 15, 2016, at the age of eighty-nine. Marcel Berger’s contributions to geometry were both broad and deep. The classification of Riemannian holo- nomy groups provided by his thesis has had a lasting impact on areas ranging from theoretical physics to alge- braic geometry. His 1960 proof that a complete oriented even-dimensional manifold with strictly quarter-pinched positive curvature must be a topological sphere is the Claude LeBrun is professor of mathematics at Stony Brook Univer- sity. His email address is
[email protected]. Gérard Besson is CNRS Research Director at Institut Fourier, Uni- For permission to reprint this article, please contact: versité Grenoble, France. His email address is g.besson@ujf
[email protected]. -grenoble.fr. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1605 1Pronounced bare-ZHAY. December 2017 Notices of the AMS 1285 research director by the CNRS. He served as president of the French Mathematical Society (SMF) during the period of 1979–80 and in this capacity helped oversee the foundation of the International Center for Mathematical Workshops (CIRM) in Luminy. In 1985 he then became director of the Institute for Higher Scientific Studies (IHÉS) in Bures-sur-Yvette, a position in which he served until 1993, when he was succeeded by his former student Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.