Understanding Jets and Hard Probes in the QGP - A Theoretical Perspective

A variety of "hard" probes are used in the study of quark-gluon plasma, among them jets, high-momentum hadrons, and heavy flavor hadrons. These probes have two things in common: They "survive" their journey through the QGP, sampling and encoding information about the deconfined medium along the way. Secondly, we believe to have some control over theoretical calculations of these probes. In this talk we review some basic principles and recent developments, focusing in particular on jets and hadrons. We also discuss how insights into the nature of QGP can be gained from these probes by systematic comparisons of Monte Carlo calculations to experimental data.