Two dimensional critical models on a torus

After the general developments of conformal invariance in two dimensions, it was realized that the study of critical models in finite geometries, in addition to the practical information it could provide through finite size scaling, was also of great conceptual interest. The simplest example is the case of the torus, a genus 1 surface which is thus not conformally equivalent to the plane. This geometry appears quite frequently in lattice calculations for systems with periodic boundary conditions, and is also very natural from the point of view of string theory. We will discuss briefly in these notes the main results obtained so far in this simple case