A short overview of the ”Topological recursion”

This is the long version of the ICM2014 proceedings. It consists in a short overview of the ”topological recursion”, a relation appearing in the asymptotic expansion of many integrable systems and in enumerative problems. We recall how computing large size asymptotics in random matrices, has allowed to discover some fascinating and ubiquitous geometric invariants. Specializations of this method recover many classical invariants, like Gromov–Witten invariants, or knot polynomials (Jones, HOMFLY,...). In this short review, we give some examples, give definitions, and review some properties and applications of the formalism.