Symplectic geometry has one of its origins in Hamiltonian dynamics. In the late 60s Arnold made a fundamental conjecture about the minimal number of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian vector fields. This is a far-reaching generalization of Poincaré's last geometric theorem and completely changed the field of symplectic geometry. In the last 30 years symplectic geometry has been tremendously developed due to the theory of holomorphic curves by Gromov and Floer homology theory by Floer. I will give a gentle introduction to the field of symplectic geometry and explain how modern methods give rise to existence results for periodic orbits and discover rigidity phenomena in symplectic geometry.
