Markus Bläser is a full professor of computer science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, since 2005. Before joining Saarbrücken, he was an assistant professor at ETH Zürich from 2003 to 2005. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Arnold Schönhage and his Habilitation from the University of Lübeck under the supervision of Rüdiger Reischuk in 2003. Together with Peter Bro Miltersen, he created the Workshop on Algebraic Complexity Theory series (WACT), while watching a backgammon game between Anna Gál and Kristoffer Arnsfelt Hansen and drinking red wine at the Dagstuhl-Seminar “Computational Complexity of Discrete Problems” in 2011.

Christian Ikenmeyer has been a full professor in computer science and mathematics at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, since 2022. He was a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool from 2019 until 2022, and a visiting assistant professor at Texas A&M University from 2013 until 2016. In Saarbrücken he was a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems from 2016 to 2019, where he met Markus Bläser. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Paderborn under the supervision of Peter Bürgisser in 2012. This survey was written during his appointments in Saarbrücken and Liverpool.