  This paper is a set of lecture notes of my course "Special functions, KZ type
equations, and representation theory" given at MIT during the spring semester
of 2002.
  The notes do not contain new results, and are an exposition (mostly without
proofs) of various published results in this area, illustrated by the simplest
nontrivial examples. Some references are given at the end of each lecture, but
their list is not complete; the reader is referred to the original articles for
proofs and for complete references.
