The paper presents recent advances in $p$-regularity theory, which has
been developing successfully for the last twenty years. The main result of
this theory gives a detailed description of the structure of the zero set
of an irregular nonlinear mapping. We illustrate the theory with an
application to degenerate problems in different fields of mathematics,
which substantiates the general applicability of the class of $p$-regular
problems. Moreover, the connection between singular problems and nonlinear
mappings is shown. Amongst the applications, the structure
of $p$-factor-operators is used to construct numerical methods for solving
degenerate nonlinear equations and optimization problems.