Sanjeev Arora obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. He has been at Princeton University since 1994 where he is professor of Computer Science. His research area is Theoretical Computer Science, specifically, Computational Complexity, uses of randomness in computation, Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCPs), computing approximate solutions to NP-hard problems, and geometric embeddings of metric spaces. He was a co-winner of the 1995 ACM Dissertation award. For his work on PCPs he was a co-winner of the 2001 Gödel Prize. He spends his spare time with his two kids, and doing black and white photography in his darkroom.

Béla Bollobás is a student of Paul Erdős, and received doctorates from Budapest, Hungary, and Cambridge, England. He has been in Cambridge since 1969, where he is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and for the past decade he has held the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Graph Theory and Combinatorics at the University of Memphis. He works mostly in Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Percolation Theory, and has published over 300 research papers and eight books, including Extremal Graph Theory, Random Graphs, and Modern Graph Theory. He has had over thirty Ph.D. students. He is a Foreign Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and was an invited speaker at the ICM in 1998.

László Lovász received his doctorate from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, where his advisor was Tibor Gallai. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received the George Pólya Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (1979), the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society (1982), the Brouwer Medal of the Dutch Mathematical Society (1993) and the Wolf Prize (1999). He is editor-in-chief of Combinatorica and editor of 12 other Journals. His field of research is mainly in combinatorial optimization, algorithms, complexity, and random walks on graphs. He has written 4 research monographs and 3 textbooks, and about 200 research papers.

Iannis Tourlakis obtained his B.Sc. in 1998 and M.Sc. in 2000 from the University of Toronto where his M.Sc. advisor was Stephen Cook. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Sanjeev Arora. When not thinking about research (mainly lower bounds in convex optimization as well as problems in derandomization) he likes to fool around with whatever musical instrument he can get his hands on, preferably a violin or piano. Failing that, like a true Canadian he'll settle for playing or watching some hockey.