A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines, he completed a PhD in mathematics in 1979. From 1973 to 2001, he worked at Ecole des mines and Inria, first on the syntax and semantics of functional programming languages, then on the development of the Esterel language. This language is used for the programming of safety-critical embedded systems and electronic circuits. In 2001, he joined the Esterel Technologies company as its Scientific Director. He returned to research at Inria in 2009, and joined Collège de France in 2012 on the Chair Algorithms, Machines, and Languages, after having held two yearly chairs there in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010.

A member of the Académie des sciences since 2002, world-renowned researcher Gérard Berry is also a passionate and engaging teacher. For several years, he has been working with various audiences to demonstrate how much digital technology shapes our everyday lives. This was the subject of his inaugural lecture How and why the world is turning digital when holding the  Liliane Bettencourt Technology Innovation chair at Collège de France in 2008.

His work has won him many honours, including the CNRS bronze medal in 1979, the Ministry of Defence’s prize for Science and Defence in 1999, the EADS Foundation’s Grand Prize for industrial applications of science in 2005, and the Gold Medal of CNRS in 2014.