PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHORS

This first issue of the journal became a "meeting place" of an international group of authors, representing five continents. Although the papers give reliable information about the authors, we add here some brief "informal" notes on all of them:

- Peter Hilton and Jean Pedersen (U.S.A.) are research mathematicians and university professors who also have a deep concern about mathematics teaching. They have collaborated extensively since 1980, producing over 100 joint papers and several books. One of their common interests is the discovery of interesting new areas of research arising from familiar mathematics at the secondary level - in the spirit of their great friend, the late George Pólya.

- Jadranka Hofman-Jablan (Yugoslavia) is a musicologist who published a monograph on symmetry in music (in Serbo-Croatian); she is the wife of the mathematician Slavik Jablan.

- Jay Kappraff (U.S.A.) is a mathematician who is the author of the book Connections, an important document of the "bridges" between art and science.

- John Langdon (U.S.A.) is a graphic artist whose book Wordplay: Ambigrams and Reflections on the Art of Ambigrams, with Martin Gardner's foreword, "reflects" (or "turns" into) a new genre at the border of art and mathematics.

- John Robinson (Australia) is sculptor who lives in Britain. Many of his works were commissioned by leading scientific institutions, and he also inspired, among others, a paper by H.S.M.Coxeter.

- Ryuji Takaki (Japan) is a physicist, the Editor of the journal Forma, the official publication of Katachi no kagaku kai (Society for Science on Form, Japan).

- Bernd Wegner (Germany) is a mathematician, the editor-in-chief of the oldest survey journal in the field of mathematics (Zentralblatt für Mathematik). His own research field is differential geometry.

- Dmitry Weise (Russia) is a medical doctor who also has time for the study of the Fibonacci numbers of the phyllotaxis (leaf arrangement).

- Kim Williams (U.S.A.) is a an architect who lives in Italy. She is the organizer of the international conferences Nexus: Relationships Between Architecture and Mathematics and also the editor of our sister electronic journal Nexus. Her new monograph Italian Pavements: Patterns in Space presents very exciting aspects of art and mathematics.