Peter Hawkes obtained his M.A. and Ph.D (and later, Sc.D.) from the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently held Fellowships of Peterhouse and of Churchill College. From 1959 – 1975, he worked in the electron microscope section of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, after which he joined the CNRS Laboratory of Electron Optics in Toulouse, of which he was Director in 1987. He was Founder-President of the European Microscopy Society and is a Fellow of the Microscopy and Optical Societies of America. He is a member of the editorial boards of several microscopy journals and serial editor of Advances in Electron Optics.Erwin Kasper studied physics at the Universities of Münster and Tübingen (Germany), where he obtained his PhD in 1965 and the habilitation to teach physics in 1969. After scientific spells in the University of Tucson, Arizona (1966) and in Munich (1970), he resumed his research and teaching in the Institute of Applied Physics, University of Tübingen, where he was later appointed professor. He lectured on general physics and especially on electron optics. The subject of his research was theoretical electron optics and related numerical methods on which he published numerous papers. After his retirement in 1997, he published a book on numerical field calculation (2001).