Volker Diekert studied in Hamburg with Ernst Witt and in Montpellier with Alexander Grothendieck. He earned his PhD in algebraic number theory in Regensburg under direction of Jürgen Neukirch and received his habilitation in Munich. Since 1991 he held the Chair for Theoretical Informatics at the University of Stuttgart until his retirement in 2023. His main research areas are algebraic foundations of computer science and algorithmic aspects of combinatorial group theory. He is coauthor of the textbooks "Elements of Discrete Mathematics" and "Discrete Algebraic Methods" and coeditor of the "Book of Traces" which became a standard for algebraic concurrency theory.
Martin Kreuzer received his doctoral degree and his habilitation in algebraic geometry at the University of Regensburg under the guidance of Ernst Kunz. Since 2007 he has held the Chair of Symbolic Computation at the University of Passau. His main research areas are computer algebra, commutative algebra, and algebraic geometry, together with their applications to cryptography, algebraic logic, coding theory, and industrial mathematics.
He is a coauthor of a fundamental three volume monograph on "Computational Commutative Algebra" and several other books. Together with Gerhard Rosenberger, he has been working on algorithmic aspects of group theory, mainly using non-commutative Gröbner bases, the cryptoanalysis of group-based cryptosystems, and the monograph "A Course in Mathematical Cryptography".