Abstract: In the first part of my talk I will give an introduction to Chow motives and explain their most important properties. In the second part I will discuss some applications. In particular I will present some recent results about the relation between motives and canonical dimension.

Abstract: In the first part of my talk I will give an introduction to Chow motives and explain their most important properties. In the second part I will discuss some applications. In particular I will present some recent results about the relation between motives and canonical dimension. (This Algebra Seminar talk is Stefan's second talk, which follows Stefan's first talk, which is a Colloquium talk.)