Statistics has developed as a field through seminal ideas and fascinating controversies. Seminal Ideas and Controversies in Statistics concerns a wide-ranging set of 15 important statistical topics, grouped into three general areas: philosophical approaches to statistical inference, important statistical methodology for applications, and topics on statistical design, focusing on the role of randomization. The key papers on each topic are discussed with commentaries to help explain them. The goal is to expand reader knowledge of the statistics literature and encourage a historical perspective.