Rigged configurations and the Bethe Ansatz

These notes arose from three lectures presented at the Summer School on Theoretical Physics "Symmetry and Structural Properties of Condensed Matter" held in Myczkowce, Poland, on September 11-18, 2002. We review rigged configurations and the Bethe Ansatz. In the first part, we focus on the algebraic Bethe Ansatz for the spin 1/2 XXX model and explain how rigged configurations label the solutions of the Bethe equations. This yields the bijection between rigged configurations and crystal paths/Young tableaux of Kerov, Kirillov and Reshetikhin. In the second part, we discuss a generalization of this bijection for the symmetry algebra $D_n^{(1)}$, based on work in collaboration with Okado and Shimozono