  We give a probabilistic introduction to determinantal and permanental point
processes. Determinantal processes arise in physics (fermions, eigenvalues of
random matrices) and in combinatorics (nonintersecting paths, random spanning
trees). They have the striking property that the number of points in a region
$D$ is a sum of independent Bernoulli random variables, with parameters which
are eigenvalues of the relevant operator on $L^2(D)$. Moreover, any
determinantal process can be represented as a mixture of determinantal
projection processes. We give a simple explanation for these known facts, and
establish analogous representations for permanental processes, with geometric
variables replacing the Bernoulli variables. These representations lead to
simple proofs of existence criteria and central limit theorems, and unify known
results on the distribution of absolute values in certain processes with
radially symmetric distributions.
