  The famous Nash embedding theorem was aimed for in the hope that if
Riemannian manifolds could be regarded as Riemannian submanifolds, this would
then yield the opportunity to use extrinsic help. However, as late as 1985 (see
\cite{G}) this hope had not been materialized. The main reason for this is due
to the lack of controls of the extrinsic properties of the submanifolds by the
known intrinsic invariants. In order to overcome such difficulties as well as
to provide answers to an open question on minimal immersions, we introduced in
the early 1990's new types of Riemannian invariants, known as the
$\delta$-invariants or the so-called Chen invariants, different in nature from
the "classical" Ricci and scalar curvatures. At the same time we also able to
establish general optimal relations between the new intrinsic invariants and
the main extrinsic invariants for Riemannian submanifolds. Since then many
results concerning these invariants, inequalities, related subjects, and their
applications have been obtained by many geometers.
  The main purpose of this article is thus to provide an extensive and
comprehensive survey of results over this very active field of research done
during the last fifteen years. Several related inequalities and their
applications are presented in this survey article as well.
