The main aim of our lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to various mathematical formalisms used to describe open quantum systems: completely positive semigroups, dilations of semigroups, quantum Langevin dynamics and the so-called Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonians. We explain two kinds of the weak coupling limit. Both of them show that Hamiltonian dynamics of a small quantum system interacting with a large resevoir can be approximated by simpler dynamics. The better known reduced weak coupling...