The sy nergism between the World Wide Web and fiber optics is a familiar story to researchers in digital communications. Fibers are the enablers of the rates of information flow that make the Internet possible. Currently there are transoceanic optical fiber cables transmitting data at rates in the range of I terabit per second (1 Tb/s), or 1012 bits per second. To put this into perspective, if one imagines that a typical book might occupy 10 megabits, then I Tb/s would be equivalent to transmitting 105 books per second, or the contents of a respectable university library in a few minutes. No other medium is capable of this rate of transmission at such distances.
With the maturing of mobile portable telephony and the emerging broadband access market, greater fiber transmission capacity will be essential in the early 21st century. Since the demand for more capacity drives the development of new optics-based technologies, liber optics therefore remains a vibrant area for research. The fact that the basic technology is mature means that the open questions are more sharply focused and permit deeper mathematical content.