Nick Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at Oxford University. An American, he taught previously at MIT and Cornell. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former President of SIAM.
David Bau was a student of Trefethen at Cornell when this book was written and then had a career in the tech industry, notably at Microsoft and Google. Most recently he has joined the computer science faculty at Northeastern University, where he leads a research group in computer vision and machine learning.