Noga Alon received his Ph. D. in Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Micha Perles. He is a Baumritter Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, and visits frequently the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He works in Combinatorics, Graph Theory and their applications to Theoretical Computer Science, focusing on combinatorial algorithms, combinatorial geometry, combinatorial number theory, algebraic and probabilistic methods in Combinatorics, and has also been working on Circuit Complexity, Streaming algorithms and topological methods in Combinatorics. He published more than three hundred and fifty research papers, and one book: The Probabilistic Method, coauthored by Joel Spencer. He is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences, and received the Erdös prize, the Feher prize, the Pólya Prize, the Bruno Memorial Award, the Landau Prize and the Gödel Prize. Although he is not Hungarian, he likes Extremal problems, has collaborated with 28 Hungarian coauthors, his favorite function is log^*, which appears in 11 of his papers, and he is, at the moment, one of the Erdös number record holders, see Erdös number records. He is married to Nurit and has three daughters; Nilli (who has written her first paper at the age of 5), Natalie and Narkis. More details can be found at Noga Alon's Home Page.

Asaf Shapira is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University. His main areas of research at present are property-testing and extremal problems in graph theory. He is a recipient of the Clore Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship and the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. Thanks to his joint papers with his advisor, he holds a (perhaps by now optimal) Erdös number 2. He is also an avid traveler, skier and gourmand. More details can be found at his Home Page.