This Research Note contains papers presented at the SIAM 40th anniversary meeting organised by the editors and held in Los Angeles in 1992. The papers focus on new fundamental results in the theory of plates and shells, with particular emphasis on the treatment of different materials and the nonlinearities involved. Asymptotic methods, such as formal expansions, homogenization, and two-scale convergence, are analytical tools that pervade much of the research. Some of the papers are also concerned with existence results, especially for nonlinear problems, using various functional analytic methods.