Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro, also known by the noms de guerre Alexander Tanarov, Sascha Piotr, and Sergei, was a Jewish Russian anarchist who fought in both the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War. Born to a wealthy family, Schapiro renounced the privileges of his upbringing and became affiliated with anarchists in his teenage years. After the dawn of the Russian Revolution, Schapiro aligned himself with the Revolutionary Army of Ukraine, and he fought alongside Nestor Makhno and Maria Nikiforova until the defeat of the anarchists at the hands of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War.

Alexander Grothendieck was a German-born mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.