Following Grothendieck, periods can be interpreted as numbers arising as coefficients of a comparison isomorphism between two cohomology theories. Due to the influence of the “yoga of motives” these numbers are omnipresent in arithmetic algebraic geometry. The first part of the talk will be a crash course on how to study periods, as well as the action of the motivic Galois group on them, via an elementary category of realizations. In the second part, we will see how one uses this framework to study Feynman integrals -- an interesting family of periods arising in quantum field theory. We will finish with a brief overview of some of the recent work in algebraic geometry inspired by the study of periods arising in physics.