These are notes of my lecture courses given in the summer of 2024 in the School on Number Theory and Physics at ICTP in Trieste and in the 27th Brazilian Algebra Meeting at IME-USP in São Paulo. We give an elementary account of $p$-adic methods in de Rham cohomology of algebraic hypersurfaces with explicit examples and applications in number theory and combinatorics. These lectures are based on the series of our joint papers with Frits Beukers entitled \emph{Dwork crystals} (\cite{DCI,DCII,DCIII}). These methods also have applications in mathematical physics and arithmetic geometry (\cite{IN,Cartier0}), which we overview here towards the end. I am grateful to the organisers of both schools and to the participants of my courses whose questions stimulated writing these notes.