Metric regularity theory lies at the very heart of variational analysis, a relatively new discipline whose appearance was, to a large extent, determined by the needs of modern optimization theory in which such phenomena as nondifferentiability and set-valued mappings naturally appear. The roots of the theory go back to such fundamental results of the classical analysis as the implicit function theorem, Sard theorem and some others. This paper offers a survey of the state of the art of some principal parts of the theory along with a variety of its applications in analysis and optimization.
