ng the sound barrier for example. Dedicated readers of RTT Hot Topics might remember our venture onto this territory in our March 2003 Hot Topic 'Turbulent Networks'. One reader hurtfully assumed the Hot Topic was an early April fool. This was of course untrue. System stability is going to be a major focus in multimedia multiservice network provision including multimedia multiservice networks with integrated mobile metadata functionality. Peter Lax wittingly or unwittingly is building on work done by Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1980s that in turn was based on the work of Lewis Fry Richardson (uncle of the late Sir Ralph Richardson) on aeronautical turbulence prior to the First World War. In 2006, the Abel Prize was awarded to Lennart Carleson for his work on harmonic analysis and his theory of smooth dynamical systems. In 2007 Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan was awarded for his work on the maths describing rare chance and probability events and a unified theory of large deviation. In 2008 Professor John Griggs Thompson, of Cambridge and Florida Universities and Professor Jacques Tits, of the Collège de France were awarded a joint prize for their work on algebra and in modern group theory. In 2009 Mikhail Gromov received the prize for his revolutionary contributions to geometry. In 2010 John Tate received the prize for his work on number theory. In 2011 John Stony received the prize for work on topology, geometry and algebra. Information-Centric Software Surprisingly, there are no Chinese mathematicians yet on this list, but presumably this will change in the future and it is likely that the specialisms may be similar. From the Abel list, Lennart Carleson conveniently brings together two story lines that we have explored. His work on harmonic analysis developed Fourier's work, but specifically applied to acoustic waveform synthesis. The popular press describes Lennart as the 'mathematician who paved the way for the iPod'. This is perhaps a rather journalistic interpretation. In practice, his work in this area in the 1960s ma