Edward O Thorp is widely known as the author of the 1962 Beat the Dealer, which was the first book to prove mathematically that blackjack could be beaten by card counting, and the 1967 Beat the Market, which showed how warrant option markets could be priced and beaten. He is regarded as one of the best hedge fund managers in the world. He is also regarded as the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Claude Shannon. Thorp received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958 and worked at MIT from 1959 to 1961. He was a professor of mathematics from 1965 to 1977 and a professor of mathematics and finance from 1977 to 1982 at the University of California, Irvine.

Dr William T Ziemba is a distinguished academic and investment practitioner. Leveraging his academic research, he has been a futures and equity trader and hedge fund and investment manager since 1983. His equity futures fund Alpha Z returned 39% in 2013-2019 and 61% net in the year ending June 2021. His research focuses on asset-liability management, portfolio theory and practice, security market imperfections, Japanese and Asian financial markets, hedge fund strategies, risk management, sports and lottery investments and applied stochastic programming.

He is Alumni Professor (Emeritus) of Financial Modeling and Stochastic Optimization in the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia where he taught from 1968-2006. Currently, he is the Distinguished Visiting Research Associate, Systemic Risk Centre, London School of Economics.

He has been a consultant to leading financial institutions including the Frank Russell Company, Morgan Stanley, Buchanan Partners, RAB Hedge Funds, Gordon Capital, Matcap, Ketchum Trading and, in the gambling area, to the BC Lotto Corporation, SCA Insurance, Singapore Pools, Canadian Sports Pool, Keeneland Racetrack and some racetrack syndicates in Hong Kong, Manila and Australia. His co-written practitioner paper on the Russell-Yasuda asset-liability model won second prize in the 1993 Edelman Practice of Management Science Competition.

He has been a visiting professor at Cambridge, Oxford, London School of Economics, University of Reading and Warwick in the UK, at Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, MIT, University of Washington and Chicago in the US, Universities of Bergamo, Venice and Luiss in Italy, the Universities of Zurich, Cyprus, Tsukuba (Japan), KAIST (Korea) and the National University and the National Technological University of Singapore.

He is widely published and cited in the field having works included in journals such as Operations Research, Management Science,, Mathematics of OR, Mathematical Programming, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, JFQA, Quantitative Finance, Journal of Portfolio Management and Journal of Banking and Finance and in many books and special journal issues.

Since 2002, he has been a regular columnist on investment strategies in sports and financial markets for the institutional investor and quantitative finance magazine Wilmott. Many of the columns are available in edited thematic volumes.