Simon Portegies Zwart is currently a professor of numerical star dynamics at Leiden University, and he has research interests in computational gravitational dynamics, stellar and binary evolution and related topics. His ongoing work has been the development and building of the Astronomical Multipurpose Software Environment (AMUSE). He has published more than 300 papers and received numerous citations in relevant works.

Steve McMillan is currently the head of the department of physics at Drexel University and his research interests lie in stellar dynamics and computations of stellar systems.

Both authors have dedicated extensive amounts of time to this book and continue to work on AMUSE as an ongoing project.