1. The place of ceramics in the world of materials

To begin with, it's essential to define what a ceramic material is, and to situate it in relation to other materials. For the record, a "material" is a solid that has properties of use, i.e. "serves a purpose".

The only ceramics that don't exactly match this criterion are a very small number of covalent compounds of boron and silicon with nitrogen and carbon, with special properties: Si ₃ N ₄ , SiC, BN, B ₄ C and B _...