elevant in many areas of telecommunications including mobile telecommunications and mobile metadata management. Geometry is important in vector maths (mathematical calculations that have direction and magnitude), number theory is important in statistical processing (for example, the processing of image signal statistics) and algebra crops up all over the place. A popular description of group theory is that it helps discover and describe what happens when one does something to something and then compares the results with the result of doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing. Group theory has been and is used in a wide cross section of physical problem solving including the modelling of turbulence and weather forecasting. Our interest in a wireless telecoms context is to study the role of group theory in the management and manipulation of complex and interrelated data sets that change over time and space at varying rates. That's why it is useful to keep track of who is winning the Abel Prize each year. They are all mature contemporary working mathematicians and as such provide an insight into evolving areas of mathematics that are potentially strategically intellectually economically and socially important. This of course assumes that the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters knows more than we do about the work of contemporary mathematicians, which for the majority of us is probably a valid assumption. In 2003, the Abel Prize was awarded to Jean-Pierre Serre for his work on topology (place and space) and group theory. In 2004, the Abel Prize was awarded jointly to Sir Michael Francis Atiyah and Isadore Singer for their work on the eponymous Atiyah-Singer index theorem, a construct for measuring and modelling how quantities and forces vary over time and space taking into account their rate of change. In 2005, the Abel Prize was awarded to Peter Lax for his work on nonlinear differential equations and singularities, the modelling of odd things that happen at odd moments, breaki