Over the last 20 years, multiscale methods and wavelets have revolutionized the field of applied mathematics by providing an efficient means of encoding isotropic phenomena. Directional multiscale systems, particularly shearlets, are now having the same dramatic impact on the encoding of multidimensional signals. Since its introduction about five years ago, the theory of shearlets has rapidly developed and gained wide recognition as the superior way of achieving a truly unified treatment in both a continuous and a digital setting. By now, it has reached maturity as a research field, with rich mathematics, efficient numerical methods, and various important applications.