Dr. Georges Matheron (December 2, 1930 - August 7, 2000) was a French mining engineer and mathematician. Starting from the works of Krige and de Wijs, from South Africa, he created a theory for estimating mining resources that he named geostatistics. During the Sixties, he extended geostatistics by developing a regression method for the cartography of natural phenomena, known as universal kriging. From 1965 to 1968, Dr Matheron co-founded the new discipline of mathematical morphology for describing set shapes and textures. He then developed a theory of the random structures involved in mathematical morphology. During the 1980s he generalized the theory of mathematical morphology to complete lattices, thus providing a common approach to sets, functions and partitions, and introduced morphological filtering. He left the Paris School of Mines in 1995, when he retired.
Dr. Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn's main research topic since 1982 has been the statistical analysis of compositional data. She was the leader of a research group on compositional data analysis involving professors from different Spanish universities from 1986 until 2008. She was also the first President of the Association for Compositional Data, founded in L'Escala (Spain) in June 2015. For the period 2017-2021 she is Past-President of the same association.
Dr. Jean Serra, emeritus professor at University of Paris-Est, established the field of mathematical morphology in 1965, before later founding the Centre de Morphologie Mathématique. His three major contributions to mathematics and physics are morphological filtering, the formulation of mathematical morphology in the convenient framework of complete lattices, and a new concept for connectivity that is the core for set segmentation theory. He founded the International Society for Mathematical Morphology, and was its first president.