These notes provide a survey of the theory of plane partitions, seen through the glasses of the work of Richard Stanley and his school.

Why were plane partitions so fascinating for MacMahon, and for legions of followers? From his writings, it is clear that MacMahon did not have any external motivation to consider these objects, nor did he have any second thoughts. For him it was obvious that these plane partitions are very natural, as two-dimensional analogues of (linear) partitions (for which at the time already a well established theory was available), and as such of intrinsic interest. Moreover, this intuition was “confirmed” by the extremely elegant product formula in Theorem 1 below. He himself — conjecturally — found another intriguing product formula for so-called “symmetric” plane partitions contained in a given box (…). Later many more such formulae were found (again, first conjecturally, and some of them still quite mysterious …). Moreover, over time it turned out that plane partitions (and rhombus tilings) are related to many other areas of mathematics, most notably to the theory of symmetric functions and representation theory of classical groups (…), representation theory of quantum groups (…), enumeration of integer points in polytopes and commutative algebra (…), enumeration of matchings in graphs (…), and to statistical physics (…).