History and role of order statistics

This paper starts with an itroduction which gives definitions of order statistics,makes a clear distinction between order statistics and rank statistics, and gives an overview of the problems in which methods based on order statstics are useful.The following sections deal with the history and role of order sta¬tistics in selected areas: central tendency, dispersion, and regression; treatment of outliers and robust estimation; maximum likelihood estimators; best linear unbiased estimators; extreme-values; multiple comparisons and studentized range. The last two sections discuss a basic coverage property and some of its conse¬quences and describe the author's chronological annotated bibliography of order statistics. Finally, there is a list of references.