  In this paper three notions of emergent geometry arising from the study of
gauge/gravity duals are discussed. The unifying theme behind these notions of
emergent geometry is that one can derive properties of the effective action of
a probe or excitation around some configuration in gauge theory which can be
argued to be localized at a particular position in the gravity dual, and match
this description to various degrees of accuracy in the gravity dual. The three
examples discussed are giant gravitons in $AdS_5\times S^5$, open strings
stretching between these giants and the probe dynamics of a D0 brane in the
presence of a thermal matrix configuration of the BFSS matrix model.
