Jop Briët was born in Leiden, The Netherlands. He spent a year in the United States when he was one year old, but remembers nothing of it. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2011 and was advised by Harry Buhrman. He met his co-authors on this paper during a postdoc at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York. He is interested in the interplay between mathematics and theoretical computer science, especially for additive combinatorics, geometric function analysis, coding theory and quantum information.

Zeev Dvir was born in Jerusalem, Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 2008. His advisors were Ran Raz and Amir Shpilka. He has a broad interest in theoretical computer science and mathematics and especially in computational complexity, pseudorandomness, coding theory and discrete mathematics.

Sivakanth Gopi (called “Gopi” by friends and colleagues) is a postdoctoral researcher in the algorithms research group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2018 under the supervision of Zeev Dvir; the title of his dissertation was “Locality in coding theory.” His main research interests are in coding theory, complexity theory, and additive combinatorics. He is also part of the DNA Storage project and Project Laplace (differential privacy) at Microsoft. He enjoys spending leisure time learning new things, staying fit, exploring nature and talking to his family.