Abstract
Studies of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars in binary systems play a significant role in improving our overall understanding of these unusual objects, yielding information on stellar masses, the motions and physics of interacting material streams connecting the stellar components and providing tests for binary stellar evolution models. The past decade has witnessed some significant changes to the picture of what constitutes a WR star and as to what role binarity plays, which is of particular relevance to this meeting. The most recent advances in the WR field can be found in the proceedings of IAU symposium No.99 — “Wolf-Rayet stars: Observations, Physics and Evolution” (de Loore & Willis 1982), whilst summaries of earlier work are contained in previous symposia devoted to studies of WR and/or 0-type stars (Gebbie & Thomas 1981, Bappu & Sahade 1973, Conti & de Loore 1979 and Chiosi & Stalio 1981). In this review I will address the question of numbers and statistics of WR + OB systems, and our knowledge of WR masses that come from orbit solutions for such systems, and discuss the proposed existence of WR stars with loss mass (collapsed) companions.
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