  In the beginning of the 1970's, Wilson developed the concept of a fully
non-perturbative renormalization group transformation. Applied to the Kondo
problem, this numerical renormalization group method (NRG) gave for the first
time the full crossover from the high-temperature phase of a free spin to the
low-temperature phase of a completely screened spin. The NRG has been later
generalized to a variety of quantum impurity problems. The purpose of this
review is to give a brief introduction to the NRG method including some
guidelines of how to calculate physical quantities, and to survey the
development of the NRG method and its various applications over the last 30
years. These applications include variants of the original Kondo problem such
as the non-Fermi liquid behavior in the two-channel Kondo model, dissipative
quantum systems such as the spin-boson model, and lattice systems in the
framework of the dynamical mean field theory.
