Abstract
Since the first observations of the lensing phenomena in the extra-galactic sky, which happened in the 1980s (see Chap. 1), gravitational lensing became one of the most powerful tools to investigate the matter distribution within galaxies and galaxy clusters. Several authors developed techniques to produce mass models of the lenses using strong and weak lensing observations. This chapter primarily focuses on mass modeling. We will review the fundamental ideas motivating the most common modeling strategies, and we will illustrate and discuss them through examples. We also discuss the problem of finding strong lenses. Finally, we provide a short review of the possible usages of mass models in several applications ranging from understanding the nature of dark matter to measuring cosmological parameters to using galaxies and clusters as cosmic telescopes to investigate the distant universe.
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