Prahladh Harsha is a theoretical computer scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). He received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the IIT Madras in 1998. He then obtained his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2004, respectively, advised by Madhu Sudan. Prior to joining TIFR in 2010, he was at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley and at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. His areas of interest include computational complexity, hardness of approximation, coding theory and information theory. Prahladh credits his mother for his interest in mathematics and dance. He is also deeply indebted to U Koteswara Rao, his high school mentor, for exposing him to both the beauty and rigour in mathematics.

Ramprasad Saptharishi is a theoretical computer scientist at the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and is generally interested in most questions of an algebraic nature. He did his Ph.D. at Chennai Mathematical Institute, advised by Manindra Agrawal, and spent a couple of years at Microsoft Research, India and Tel Aviv University for his postdoc. His other interests include board games, reading ridiculously long web-series and writing software code. However, writing reasonable biographies continues to remain outside his area of expertise.