Benjamin Heyne was a botanist who joined the East India Service in 1793 being appointed as the Madras Presidency Botanist to Samalkot in British India in 1796. After the fall of Mysore, Heyne was ordered to accompany the Mysore Survey led by Colin Mackenzie on which Heyne worked as assistant to Francis Buchanan. Heyne was placed in charge of the Lalbagh botanical garden till 1812 and sent many specimens to London and to Albrecht Wilhelm Roth, the German botanist. Heyne died in Madras in 1819.
Max Müller, was a German-born philologist and Orientalist, a founder in the western academic field of Indian studies. He was born in Dessau and was educated in Leipzig. In 1850, he was appointed deputy Taylorian professor of modern European languages at Oxford University and in 1868 was made Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Philology. "The Sacred Books of the East", a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction. He also promoted the idea of a Turanian family of languages.
Edward Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He was born in Suffolk, lived part of his childhood in France, and attended Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a lifelong friend of Bernard Quaritch who published his the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in 1857, at first anonymously.