  The Hipparcos mission has made it possible to constrain the positions of
nearby field stars in the colour-magnitude diagram with very high accuracy.
These positions can be compared with the predictions of stellar evolutionary
calculations to provide information on the basic parameters of the stars:
masses, radii, effective temperatures, ages, and chemical composition.
  The degeneracy between mass, age, and metallicity is not so large as to
prevent a reliable estimate of masses, radii and effective temperatures, at
least for stars of solar metallicity. The evolutionary models of Bertelli et
al. (1994) predict those parameters finely, and furthermore, the applied
transformation from the theoretical (log g-Teff) to the observational (Mv-B-V)
plane is precise enough to derive radii with an uncertainty of ~ 6%, masses
within ~ 8%, and Teffs within ~ 2% for a certain range of the stellar
parameters. This is demonstrated by means of comparison with the measurements
in eclipsing binaries and the InfraRed Flux Method.
  The application of the interpolation procedure in the theoretical isochrones
to the stars within 100 pc from the Sun observed with Hipparcos provides
estimates for 17,219 stars
