Evolution in the mass function of galaxy clusters sensitively traces both the expansion history of the Universe and cosmological structure formation. Hence, measuring the number density of galaxy clusters as a function of ...

In recent years, the distribution of galaxies in the Universe could be measured up to large distances and over a significant part of the sky. The analysis of this large-scale structure contains a wealth of cosmological ...

Cosmology has recently entered an era of increasingly rich observational data sets, all being in agreement with a cosmological standard model that features only a small number of free parameters. One of the most powerful ...

One of the main problems in cosmology is to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and large-scale structure. Whereas the basics of the current Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm for structure ...

The formation of structures in the universe, such as galaxy clusters, depends sensitively on cosmological parameters. Measuring the abundance of clusters as a function of mass and redshift therefore yields a way to constrain ...

This work is concerned with different aspects of observational cosmology. It covers a broad range of problems that one needs to deal with in optical astronomy.
Three introduction chapters about cosmology, gravitational ...