Samuel E. Buttrey received a bachelor's degree in statistics from Princeton University in 1983. After 8 years as a Wall Street computer systems analyst, he returned to graduate school and received MA and PhD degrees in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, the latter in 1996. In that year, he joined the faculty of the Department of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has published papers on nearest-neighbor and other classification methods and on applied problems ranging from numismatics and oceanography to human vision. He has also published papers describing his implementations of algorithms in software. His interests include classification, computationally intensive methods, and statistical graphics, and most recently, inter-point distance measures for mixed categorical and numeric data. He lives in Pacific Grove, California, with wife Elinda, son John, and some cats.

Lyn R. Whitaker received a bachelor's degree in genetics in 1978 and a PhD in statistics from the University of California, Davis, in 1985. She was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1988, and joined the faculty of the Department of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1988. Her interests are applied statistics relevant to defense issues. These include unsupervised methods for large and messy data, the statistical aspects of reliability and survival analysis, and most recently, jointly with Buttrey, development and use of inter-point distances for mixed data types. She resides in Monterey, California, with husband Mike, father Fred, and, occasionally, children Alex, Lee, and Mary.