A Personal Appreciation of Walter Noll

Walter Noll is personally acknowledged to have been an inspirational teacher and an exemplar in his analysis of fundamental concepts and relations in Continuum Mechanics. Attention is drawn to unfounded criticisms of two aspects of his work and how considerations of local spatial and temporal averaging of microscopic behaviour can complement and inform the continuum viewpoint. Remarks on such considerations briefly summarise the results of published works which both utilised Noll's direct notation and attempted to emulate his precision and clarity.