Christer Sturmark is a Swedish author and public intellectual. He is the founder and publisher of Fri Tanke ('Free Thought') and often appears on television and in public gatherings to defend science and to argue against dogmas, superstition, and pseudoscientific thinking. He lives on the island of Lidingö, just outside Stockholm, with his nine-year-old son Leo, and enjoys playing piano, guitar, and chess.

Douglas Hofstadter is a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University. His first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. He is known for his writings on minds and machines, analogy, and translation.