Abstract: The known basic building blocks of matter, the quarks and leptons, come in three generations or flavors. The masses and interactions of the different flavors show a very hierarchical structure and the origin of these hierarchies remains an unsolved mystery of particle physics. The same hierarchies lead to a very high sensitivity of flavor changing processes to new undiscovered particles even outside the reach of direct searches at particle colliders.
In this colloquium I will present the status of our understanding of flavor and discuss recent hints in flavor observables for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
