The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was recently awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution".

In a nutshell, cryo-electron microscopy is a method to determine the three-dimensional structure of molecules from their two-dimensional images taken by an electron microscope. While the prize was awarded to the pioneers of the field, recent instrumentation and algorithmic breakthroughs have revolutionized it, introducing capabilities that until recently were unimaginable.

In this talk I will give an introduction to cryo-electron microscopy, and in particular, its mathematical aspects and challenges.