The top quark and other fermion masses

Recent developments on approaches to the quark lepton mass problem are reviewed. In particular we discuss dynamical calculations of the top quark mass at (a) the infrared quasifixed point of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model renormalisation group equations, and (b) a strongly first order critical point of the Standard Model effective potential. The phenomenology of symmetric mass matrix ans\"{a}tze with texture zeros at the unification scale is also considered. The underlying chiral symmetry presumed responsible for the fermion mass hierarchy is discussed, with particular reference to superstring based models