David M. Himmelblau was Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professor Emeritus in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas, where he taught for forty-two years. He authored eleven books and more than two hundred articles on process analysis, fault detection, and optimization. He was president of the CACHE Corporation, and director of AIChE.

James B. Riggs was a university professor for thirty years. Twenty-five of those years were spent at Texas Tech University, where he founded and directed the Texas Tech Process Control and Optimization Consortium. He authored several popular textbooks, including Computational Methods for Engineers with MATLAB Applications, Thirteenth Edition; Programming with MATLAB for Engineers, Fourteenth Edition; and Chemical and Bio-Process Control, Fifth Edition.