  These are the notes for a series of lectures at the Institute of Geometry and
Topology of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in July 13-15, 2022. We
assume basic knowledge of isometric actions on Riemannian manifolds, including
the normal slice theorem and the principal orbit type theorem. Lecture 1
introduces polar actions and culminates with Heintze, Liu and Olmos's argument
to characterize them in terms of integrability of the distribution of normal
spaces to the principal orbits. The other two lectures are devoted to two of
Lytchak and Thorbergsson's results. In Lecture 2 we briefly review Riemannian
orbifolds from the metric point of view, and explain their characterization of
orbifold points in the orbit space of a proper and isometric action in terms of
polarity of the slice representation above. In Lecture 3 we present their proof
of the fact that variationally complete actions in the sense of Bott and
Samelson on non-negatively curved manifolds are hyperpolar. The appendix
contains explanations of some results used in the lectures, namely: a more or
less self-contained derivation of Wilking's transversal Jacobi equation; a
discussion of Cartan's and Hermann's criterions for the existence of totally
geodesic submanifolds, and a criterion for the polarity of isometric actions on
symmetric spaces.
