16. Epilogue

This concluding chapter first summarizes the historical developments exposed in a critical manner in all preceding chapters. It emphasizes the various nonlinear generalizations proposed in the Twentieth century as also the role played by remarkable schools and individuals in the fantastic progress reached in this period. This concerns more realistic material behaviors (accounting for microstructures, involving coupled fields), a more axiomatic and thermodynamically justified approach, and a clear internationalization of engineering science. Simultaneously, progress in other collateral branches of sciences, both theoretical and experimental, has fostered a rapid, sometimes unexpected, progress in the science of continuum mechanics. The latter has become more a mechanics of materials while developing tremendously its applicable side with performing numerical schemes and requiring new developments in applied analysis and the interpretation in terms of advanced geometrical concepts. Final remarks points at the new marked interest of continuum mechanics for living matter and the unavoidable relationship, both intellectually and numerically, between different scales of description, a trademark at the dawn of the Twenty first century.