Frank Proschan
Frank Proschan was an mathematical statistician and operations researcher. He was emeritus professor of statistics at Florida State University. He and Richard E. Barlow are credited as the founders of reliability testing. Proschan was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Education and career
Proschan was born and raised in poverty in a one-bedroom tenement in New York City. He earned his BSc in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1941. He then had a series of jobs at the National Bureau of Standards, the United States Geological Survey, and back to the NBS. He attended George Washington University part-time and earned his MSc in statistics in 1948. While working at Sylvania Electric Products, he enrolled in Stanford University and earned his PhD in statistics in 1960. His PhD thesis, Polya-Type Distributions in Renewal Theory, with an Application to an Inventory Problem, was written under the tutelage of Herbert Scarf. His thesis won the Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award.While at Sylvania, Proschan met Barlow who also studied for his PhD at Stanford. They collaborated on The Mathematical Theory of Reliability in 1966 and went on to write Statistical Theory of Reliability and Life Testing in 1975. These texts are considered to be the first to develop the probability theory that is the foundation of reliability testing. For their "important contributions to all aspects of reliability theory, including stochastic modeling, optimization, statistical inference and engineering design" they were awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Operations Research Society of America.
After completing his PhD, Proschan joined Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories where he stayed for ten years. In 1970, he joined the Department of Statistics at Florida State University, taking emeritus status in 1992. While at Florida State, he was appointed as the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor.