Vladimir Markovich Entov (1937-2008) worked at the Institute for Problems in Mechanics of the Soviet Academy of Science fom 1971 onwards. Since 1983 he also was Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Modeling at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas (now known as the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas). In later years he was involved in research and teaching activity at Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and the University of Stanford and served as member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Applied Mathematics.

Elena Valerievna Glivenko is a professor of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Gubkin University of Oil and Gas, Moscow. Her interests include the development of new computational methods with a natural parallelism based on algebraic topology and mini-operational systems for the study of earthquake catalogs aimed at prediction of strong events. She authored about 100 scientific publications and 7 monographs.