Jean Bourgain (1954-2018) received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1977. He was professor at I.H.E.S., the University of Illinois, and from 1994, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He worked on functional analysis, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, partial differential equations, number theory, and combinatorics. He was a recipient of the Fields Medal (1994), the Shaw Prize (2010), and the Breakthrough Prize (2017).

Jeff Kahn received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1979, under the direction of D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri, and, following some time at MIT, has been at Rutgers since 1984. He works on discrete mathematics and related topics, and is a recipient of the Pólya Prize (1996) and the Fulkerson Prize (2012).

Gil Kalai graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983; his advisor was Micha A. Perles. He works on geometric and probabilistic combinatorics, convexity, and linear programming. He is known for his blog, his interest in advancing women in academia, and his “argument against quantum computers.”