The notion of stiffness, which originated in several applications of a
different nature, has dominated the activities related to the numerical
treatment of differential problems for the last fifty years. Contrary to what
usually happens in Mathematics, its definition has been, for a long time, not
formally precise (actually, there are too many of them). Again, the needs of
applications, especially those arising in the construction of robust and
general purpose codes, require nowadays a formally precise definition. In this
paper, we review the evolution of such a notion and we also provide a precise
definition which encompasses all the previous ones.