Christian Coester is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 2020, under the supervision of Elias Koutsoupias. After stints as a postdoctoral researcher at CWI in Amsterdam and University of Sheffield, he returned to Oxford in 2022. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, especially online algorithms and learning-augmented algorithms. Outside of his research, he enjoys sports, chess and playing the piano.

James R. Lee is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, under the supervision of Christos Papadimitriou, followed by a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research interests are varied and eclectic, ranging from spectral graph algorithms to functional analysis, and from convex optimization to statistical physics. He challenged a class of undergrads to compete against the MTS algorithm in this paper. They fought (and coded) valiantly. They PyTorched and TensorFlowed. But in the end, the Theory won.