Ronald DeVore's speciality is Nonlinear Approximation Theory. He is The Walter E. Koss Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M University.He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received an Honorary Doctorate from RWTH Aachen in 2004. In 2006, he was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Angela Kunoth is working on wavelet and multiscale methods for solving partial differential equations and for data analysis purposes. She holds the Chair of Complex Systems at Universitaet Paderborn since 2007 and is an editor of five journals in applied mathematics and numerics.