Conforti, Cornuéjols, Robertson, Seymour, and Thomas, according to which every Berge graph either forms one of five types of basic building block (special classes of perfect graphs) or it has one of four different types of structural decomposition into simpler graphs. A minimally imperfect Berge graph cannot have any of these decompositions, from which it follows that no counterexample to the theorem can exist. This idea was based on previous conjectured structural decompositions of similar type that would have implied the strong perfect graph conjecture but turned out to be false. The five basic classes of perfect graphs that form the base case of this structural decomposition are the bipartite graphs, line graphs of bipartite graphs, complementary graphs of bipartite graphs, complements of line graphs of bipartite graphs, and double split graphs. It is easy to see that bipartite graphs are perfect: in any nontrivial induced subgraph, the clique number and chromatic number are both two and therefore both equal. The perfection of complements of bipartite graphs, and of complements of line graphs of bipartite graphs, are both equivalent to Kőnig's theorem relating the sizes of maximum matchings, maximum independent sets, and minimum vertex covers in bipartite graphs. The perfection of line graphs of bipartite graphs can be stated equivalently as the fact that bipartite graphs have chromatic index equal to their maximum degree, proven by . Thus, all four of these basic classes are perfect. The double split graphs are a relative of the split graphs that can also be shown to be perfect. The four types of decompositions considered in this proof are 2-joins, complements of 2-joins, balanced skew partitions, and homogeneous pairs. A 2-join is a partition of the vertices of a graph into two subsets, with the property that the edges spanning the cut between these two subsets form two vertex-disjoint complete bipartite graphs. When a graph has a 2-join, it may be decomposed into induced subgraphs called "blocks", by replacing one of the two subsets of vertices by a shortest path within that subset that connects one of the two complete bipartite graphs to the other; when no such path exists, the block is formed instead by replacing one of the two subsets of vertices by two vertices, one for each complete bipartite subgraph. A 2-join is perfect if and only if its two blocks are both perfect. Therefore, if a minimally imperfect graph has