Shiying Dong grew up in rural China, where bamboo weaving was an inseparable part of life, which kindled her passion for mathematical craft. Before she started creating original shapes with her hands, she devoted most of her energy to the traditional paper-and-pencil way of studying spacetime. Shiying has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master's in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. She won a Silver Medal and the Best Female Participant Award in the first Asian Physics Olympiad in 2000. In November 2023, Shiying was one of the two grand prize winners of the Einstein Mad Hat Awards, organized by MoMath and the UK Maths Trust. She was also the recipient of the Best Textile, Sculpture or Other Medium Award in the JMM Mathematical Art Exhibition, 2025, featured in the NY Times. Since 2023, she has been exhibiting her work at MoMath, Gathering 4 Gardner, JMM, Bridges, Vogue Knitting Live, and various museums. She has given dozens of talks on topological crochet and held more than a hundred workshops on crochet and mathematical art and craft. She was the Innovator-in-Residence of the Innovation Lab in Greenwich Library, Greenwich, CT, from September 2025 to November 2025.

Eve Torrence has loved art, crafting, and mathematics since she was a child. She has been very lucky to build a career that merged these passions. She has a PhD in mathematics from the University of Virginia and is professor emeritus at Randolph-Macon College, where she was a member of the faculty from 1994 to 2021. Eve designed and taught many mathematical arts courses at R-MC, in which she used knitting, crochet, bead crochet, and origami to introduce, explain, and illustrate mathematical topics. She has exhibited her mathematical artwork at numerous juried shows at the JMM and Bridges conferences. Eve's sculpture Day was awarded the People's Choice Award at the 2015 Bridges Mathematical Art Exhibition. She is currently a member of the Board of the Bridges Organization and serves as the managing editor of the Bridges Conference Proceedings. Eve is the author of Cut and Assemble Icosahedra: Twelve Models in White and Color and co-author of The Student's Introduction to Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. In 2013, Eve received a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. She has served as the chair of the Maryland-DC-Virginia Section of the MAA and President of Pi Mu Epsilon National Mathematics Honor Society.