Douglas C. Schmidt is a computer scientist and author in the fields of object-oriented programming, distributed computing and design patterns.
Erich Gamma (born 1961 in Zürich) is a Swiss computer scientist and co-author of the influential software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. He co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework with Kent Beck and led the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools (JDT).
John Matthew Vlissides (August 2, 1961 - November 24, 2005) was a software scientist known mainly as one of the four authors (referred to as the Gang of Four) of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Vlissides referred to himself as "#4 of the Gang of Four and wouldn't have it any other way".
Martin Fowler (born 1963) is a British software engineer, author and international public speaker on software development, specializing in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.
Ralph E. Johnson is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, for which he won the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.
Richard Helm recently rejoined IBM to start the Australian branch of the Object Technology Practice. He has numerous international publications, writes regularly in Dr. Dobb's Journal, and is a past OOPSLA program committee member. Also, he has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne, Australia.