Alexander Gogolin was born in Tbilisi (Georgia) in 1965. After graduation from Lomonosov State University (Moscow, Russia) he defended his PhD thesis at the Lebedev Physical Institute (Moscow, Russia) in 1991. Soon after that he became a permanent member of staff of Landau Institute for theoretical physics (Moscow, Russia). In 1995 he moved to UK where he soon became a Professor of mathematical physics at the Department of Mathematics of the Imperial College London (UK). He died in London in April 2011.  Ellen Tsitsishvili was born in Tbilisi (Georgia) in 1941 and received her PhD degree from Lomonosov State University (Moscow, Russia) in 1970. Since 1964 she is a permanent member of staff and professor at the Institute for Cybernetics (Tbilisi, Georgia). She is working on problems in condensed matter theory in many international collaborations with researchers of Scuola Normale (Pisa, Italy), University of Strasbourg (France), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), Center of Functional Nanostructures (Karlsruhe, Germany) and  University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). Andreas Komnik was born in Karaganda (Kazakhstan) in 1972. He studied physics at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Russia) and University of Freiburg (Germany), where in 1999 he acquired his PhD degree. After that he was research associate at the Department of Mathematics of the Imperial College London (UK) and at CEA Saclay (France). Between 2008 and 2012 he was a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg (Germany).