ABSTRACT
This closing chapter is mainly devoted to a new equilibrium theory of liquid crystals, which has been recently formulated by Ericksen (1991) in a rigorous way, though it had been anticipated in some earlier works of De Gennes (1969 and 1971), Fan (1971) and Fan and Stephen (1970). This theory is primarily meant to describe through the same mathematical model all defects occurring in liquid crystals, those for which the classical theory is successful as well as those for which it fails.
