Gravitational lensing

Abstract

This is a short and biased review of gravitational lensing with emphasis on the radio and especially VLBI aspects. We briefly explain the basic idea and give a short sketch of the discovery of the first lens, before we more systematically discuss the general fields that can be studied with lensing. We intentionally omit the details the average lensing expert would like to see and instead try to give a very general overview addressed to the radio astronomer working in some other field. The lens B0218+357 is presented as an example to show many aspects of lensing in a case that already has led to interesting results but still has additional potential for the future.Comment: 16 pages, many colour figures. To appear in the proceedings (http://pos.sissa.it/cgi-bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=36) of the 8th EVN symposium held in Torun, Poland, September 200