[en] The description of the motion of charged-particle beams in an accelerator proceeds in steps of increasing complexity. The first step is to consider a single-particle picture in which the beam is represented as a collection on non-interacting test particles moving in a prescribed external electromagnetic field. Knowing the external field, it is then possible to calculate the beam motion to a high accuracy. The real beam consists of a large number of particles, typically 10¹¹ per beam bunch. It is sometimes inconvenient, or even impossible, to treat the real beam behavior using the single particle approach. One way to approach this problem is to supplement the single particle by another qualitatively different picture. The commonly used tools in accelerator physics for this purpose are the Vlasov and the Fokker-Planck equations. These equations assume smooth beam distributions and are therefore strictly valid in the limit of infinite number of micro-particles, each carrying an infinitesimal charge. The hope is that by studying the two extremes -- the single particle picture and the picture of smooth beam distributions -- we will be able to describe the behavior of our 10¹¹-particle system. As mentioned, the most notable use of the smooth distribution picture is the study of collective beam instabilities. However, the purpose of this lecture is not to address this more advanced subject. Rather, it has the limited goal to familiarize the reader with the analytical tools, namely the Vlasov and the Fokker-Planck equations, as a preparation for dealing with the more advanced problems at later times. We will first derive these equations and then illustrate their applications by several examples which allow exact solutions