The distribution of galaxies in the low redshift Universe provides information on the initial conditions, energy content and evolution of the Universe from its almost Gaussian primordial state to the highly non-linear cosmic web that we observe today. In this talk I will introduce a class of statistics that are capable of extracting both Gaussian and non-Gaussian information from the matter distribution. The so-called Minkowski Functionals and their rank-2 tensorial generalisation are a class of topological descriptors of a field which can be used to measure cosmological parameters, test the degree of non-Gaussianity as a function of scale and also provide a mechanism to test statistical isotropy. I will describe these statistics, explain how we extract them from galaxy catalogs and elucidate what they can tell us about the properties of the Universe.