Matthieu Ricard (born 15 February 1946) is a French Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal.

Born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie, France, he is the son of the late Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard), a renowned French philosopher, and grew up among the personalities and ideas of French intellectual circles. He first travelled to India in 1967.

His mother is the lyrical abstractionist painter Yahne Le Toumelin, who has been a Buddhist nun since 1968.

He worked for a Ph.D. degree in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur. After completing his doctoral thesis in 1972, Ricard decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived in the Himalayas studying with the Kangyur Rinpoche and some other great masters of that tradition and became the close student and attendant of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche until his death in 1991. Since then, Dr. Ricard has dedicated his activities to fulfilling Khyentse Rinpoche’s vision.

Carlo Strenger (born July 16, 1958) is a Swiss-Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst and public intellectual. He is Chair of the Clinical Graduate Program at the Department of Psychology of Tel Aviv University. His research centers on the impact of globalization on meaning, personal and group identity. As a publicist he focuses primarily on the Middle Eastern Conflict on which he takes a liberal perspective favoring the two-state solution.

Carlo Strenger was born in Basel, Switzerland into an orthodox Jewish family. He describes his transition from Orthodox Judaism to secular atheism as the defining experience of his life. Already an atheist, he spent a year at a Yeshiva after completing high-school and then started his studies in psychology and philosophy in Zürich, Switzerland. He moved to Israel, trained in philosophy and clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, and taught modern thought at the Department of Philosophy. He then moved to Tel Aviv, Israel where he currently lives with his wife, Julia Elad-Strenger, a political psychologist.

Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943 in Algiers, French Algeria) is a French economist, writer and senior civil servant.

Former adviser to President François Mitterrand and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, he founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance and was nominated President of the Commission for the Liberation of French Economic Growth. He is also Founder and President of A&A, a consultancy firm. He published more than fifty books, including essays and novels.

He belongs to the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, according to the Foreign Policy Magazine (May/June 2008)

Jacques Attali was born on November, 1st 1943 in Algiers (Algeria), with his twin brother Bernard Attali, in a Jewish family . His father, Simon Attali, is a self-educated person who achieved success in perfumery (« Bib et Bab » shop) in Algiers. In 1956, two years after the beginning of the Algerian independence war (1954–1962), his father decided to move to Paris, with his family (Jacques was then 13).

Carole Bouquet (born 18 August 1957) is a French actress and fashion model, who has appeared in more than 40 films since 1977. Bouquet was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

Her classical good looks won her a role as the Bond girl Melina Havelock in the 1981 movie For Your Eyes Only, but she also acted in a number of mainstream European films throughout the 1980s and continues to do so in France.

She is also recognized for her work in Luis Buñuel's surrealist classic That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and in the internationally successful film Too Beautiful For You (1989), for which she won the César Award for Best Actress. Also she received a César Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Rive droite, rive gauche (1984).

Bouquet was a model for Chanel in the 1980s-1990s. She is the widow of producer Jean-Pierre Rassam with whom she had a son, Dimitri Rassam. From 1997 to 2005, she dated actor Gérard Depardieu, with whom she had worked several times. Bouquet was engaged to him from 2003 to 2005.^{[citation needed]}