  Finite metric spaces arise in many different contexts. Enormous bodies of
data, scientific, commercial and others can often be viewed as large metric
spaces. It turns out that the metric of graphs reveals a lot of interesting
information. Metric spaces also come up in many recent advances in the theory
of algorithms. Finally, finite submetrics of classical geometric objects such
as normed spaces or manifolds reflect many important properties of the
underlying structure. In this paper we review some of the recent advances in
this area.
