KENNETH (KEN) O. KORTANEK is a John F. Murray Research Professor of Management Sciences at the University of Iowa, Henry B. Tippie College of Business. His academic career includes obtaining tenure at Cornell University's Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 1968, and a 10 year professorship in Carnegie Mellon University's Mathematics Department. Since 1962 he has published over 130 articles, a book, and several edited volumes on optimization, many of them financially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He regularly acts as a consultant for large corporations.

VLADIMIR G. MEDVEDEV is a mathematician at OmniCADD, Inc. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the last 10 years he was an Associate Professor in the Optimal Control Methods Department of the Belarussian State University. He holds a Ph.D. in the Physical-Mathematical Sciences from the Belarussian Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he received the Best Paper Award from the Belarussian Soros Foundation for a paper underlying his thesis. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Iowa for the year 1997-1998.