Sariel Har-Peled graduated from Tel-Aviv University in 1999, under the supervision of Micha Sharir. He works mainly on geometric approximation algorithms. He often teaches the “Randomized Algorithms” course based on the book by the Rajeev Motwani and Prabhakar Raghavan.

Piotr Indyk received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000, under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. His research interests include high-dimensional computational geometry, sketching and streaming algorithms, sparse recovery, and compressive sensing.

Rajeev Motwani was born on March 24, 1962 in Jammu, India. He died on June 5, 2009. He received a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1983 and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1988 under the supervision of Richard Karp. The list of his research interests is long and eclectic, and includes graph theory, approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms, on-line algorithms, complexity theory, web search and information retrieval, databases, data mining, computational drug design, robotics, streaming algorithms, and data privacy. He received the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his research on probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation.