Unusual or extreme values can have devastating effects in real life. Think about floods, bankruptcy of insurers or a melt-down in a nuclear plant. We need to ensure that the probability of such a disaster is extremely small. The Dutch dykes, for example, are designed to withstand all floods, except for once every 10,000 years. Extreme value theory, a branch within probability and statistics, analyses the size of such extremal events and their probabilistic properties. Large deviation theory, on the other hand, is concerned with the study of rare events and attempts to quantify how rare they are. In this course, you will learn the basics of both these branches of mathematics