Fekete points, an Overview. Lecture 1

An overview of the distribution of Fekete points in several contexts is presented. These are points that minimize a certain energy and that appear naturally in problems ranging from electrostatics to approximation theory. We overview the results in different contexts, from the clasical weighted Fekete points in the plane to more elaborated versions in complex manifolds. We explore how the conection to other sets of points can be enlightening in their study and will provide some applications.