  Large ensembles of points with Coulomb interactions arise in various settings
of condensed matter physics, classical and quantum mechanics, statistical
mechanics, random matrices and even approximation theory, and give rise to a
variety of questions pertaining to calculus of variations, Partial Differential
Equations and probability. We will review these as well as "the mean-field
limit" results that allow to derive effective models and equations describing
the system at the macroscopic scale. We then explain how to analyze the next
order beyond the mean-field limit, giving information on the system at the
microscopic level. In the setting of statistical mechanics, this allows for
instance to observe the effect of the temperature and to connect with
crystallization questions.
