One of the most interesting phenomena exhibited by ultracold quantum gases is the appearance of vortices when the gas is put in rotation. The talk will bring a survey of some recent progress in understanding this phenomenon starting from the many-body ground state of a Bose gas with short range interactions. Mathematically this amounts to describing solutions of a linear Schrödinger equation with a very large number of variables in terms of a nonlinear equation with few variables and analyzing the...