Abstract: The Trjitzinsky Memorial Lectures will be held October 10-12, 2017. Alexander Kechris will present "A descriptive set theoretic approach to problems in harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and combinatorics." Descriptive set theory is the study of definable sets and functions in Polish (complete, separable metric) spaces, like, e.g., the Euclidean spaces. It has been a central area of research in set theory for over 100 years. Over the past three decades, there has been extensive work on the interactions and applications of descriptive set theory to other areas of mathematics, including analysis, dynamical systems, and combinatorics. My goal in these lectures is to give a taste of this area of research, including an extensive historical background. These lectures require minimal background and should be understood by anyone familiar with the basics of measure theory and functional analysis. Also the three lectures are essentially independent of each other.