The urgent need to describe and to solve certain problems connected to extreme phenomena in various areas of applications has been of decisive influence on the vital development of extreme value theory. After the pioneering work of M. Frechet (1927) and of R.A. Fisher and L.R.C. Tippett (1928), who discovered the limiting distributions of extremes, the importance of mathematical concepts of extreme behavior in applications was impressively demonstrated by statisticians like E.J. Gumbel and W. Weibull. The predominant role of applied aspects in that early period may be highlighted by the fact...