Throughout the century that has passed since Ernst Ising submitted his PhD thesis in 1924, the Ising (-Lenz) model has provided an incredibly fruitful challenge that gave rise to entirely new branches of physics and mathematics. In this colloquium I will focus on the conformal bootstrap program which was designed by Polyakov in 1974 as a mathematical method to access non-perturbative aspects of critical systems/fixed points of the renormalization groups. In the light of holography, such systems are also relevant for the study of quantum gravity. In my presentation I will review some of the milestone achievements of the modern conformal bootstrap and outline current frontiers. The advances will be benchmarked mostly within the context of the 3D Ising model.