Eric Allender is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University. He has been at Rutgers since receiving his Ph.D. in 1985 at Georgia Tech, under the supervision of Kim N. King. While at Georgia Tech, he was the Backbone of the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable and he still plays trombone from time to time. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory. Circuit complexity, Kolmogorov complexity, and complexity classes are his main research interests. He and his wife find happiness on the dance floor and toiling in their garden.

Klaus-Jörn Lange has been a professor at the University of Tübingen since 1995. Before that, he was a professor of theoretical computer science at the Technical University of Munich for eight years. He got his degrees at the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Wilfried Brauer. His main field of research is the study of the relations between formal languages and complexity theory. As a university student he invested a lot of time (maybe too much) in the game of Go reaching the rank of sandan, and served some years as the head of the Go club in Hamburg.