Chair-Free Berge Graphs Are Perfect

A graph G is called Berge if neither G nor its complement contains a chordless cycle with an odd number of nodes. The famous Berge’s Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture asserts that every Berge graph is perfect. A chair is a graph with nodes {a, b, c, d, e} and edges {ab, bc, cd, eb}. We prove that a Berge graph with no induced chair (chair-free) is perfect or, equivalently, that the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture is true for chair-free graphs.