The Kobayashi distance in holomorphic dynamics and operator theory

These are the notes of a short course I gave in the school "Aspects m\'etriques et dynamiques en analyse complete", Lille, May 2015. The aim of this notes is to describe how to use a geometric structure (namely, the Kobayashi distance) to explore and encode analytic properties of holomorphic functions and maps defined on complex manifolds. We shall first describe the main properties of the Kobayashi distance, and then we shall present applications to holomorphic dynamics in taut manifolds, strongly pseudo convex domains and convex domains, and to operator theory in Bergman spaces (Carleson measures and Toeplitz operators).