Michael Droettboom holds a Master's Degree in Computer Music Research from The Johns Hopkins University. His research in optical music recognition lead to the development of the Gamera document image analysis framework, which has been used to recognize features in documents as diverse as medieval manuscript, Navajo texts, historical Scottish census data, and early American sheet music. His focus on computer graphics has lead to specializations in consumer electronics, computer-assisted engineering, and most recently, the science software for the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is currently one of the most active developers on the Matplotlib project.
Reinier Heeres has an MSc degree in Applied Physics from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He is currently pursuing a PhD there in the Quantum Transport group of the nanoscience department.
He has previously worked on Sugar, the child-friendly user interface mainly in use by One Laptop Per Child's $100 laptop. For this project, he designed the Calculator application.
Recently, he revived and extended the 3D plotting functionalities for Matplotlib to make it an excellent 2D graphing library, and a simple 3D plotting tool again.