Homological stability is the classical phenomenon that for many natural families of moduli spaces the homology groups stabilize. Often the limit is the homology of another interesting space; for example, the homology of the braid groups converges to the homology of the space of self-maps of the Riemann sphere. Representation stability makes it possible to extend this to situations where classical homological stability simply does not hold, using ideas inspired by asymptotic representation theory. I will give a broad survey of homological stability and a gentle introduction to the tools and results of representation stability, focusing on its applications in topology.

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