Recent technological advances have now made it possible to carry out deep optical surveys of major fractions of the visible sky. Such surveys enable a diverse array of astronomical investigations, ranging from the search for small moving objects in the solar system to studies of the assembly history of the Milky Way. In terms of cosmology, wide-field surveys can yield tight constraints on models of dark energy using a variety of independent techniques. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is the most ambitious project of this kind that has yet been proposed. With an 8.4 m primary mirror, and its 3.2 Gigapixel, 10 square degree camera, LSST will provide a nearly an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed over all existing surveys, or those which are currently in development. Over its ten years of operation, LSST will survey 20,000 square degrees of sky in six optical colors down to 27th magnitude. At least a thousand distinct images will be acquired of every field, enabling a plethora of statistical investigations for intrinsic variability and for control of systematics in deep imaging studies. I will describe some of the science that will be made possible by the construction of LSST and give a brief overview of the technical design.