A conversation with Richard Barlow

Abstract

Richard E. Barlow was one of the two founders of modern reliability theory (Frank Proschan was the other). Two of their books [Barlow and Proschan, 1965, 1975] have been influential in shaping this field. Barlow was born in 1931 in Galesburg, Illinois. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Knox College in 1953, his master’s in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1960. He worked at the Institute of Defense Analysis (1960 –1961) and General Telephone (1961 –1963) before joining the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 1963. He was at Berkeley until his retirement in 1999 and is now Professor Emeritus. He has visited the Boeing Scientific Laboratories (1966) and Florida State University (1975 –1976) as well as many other places. He has been an associate editor of most of the major statistics and operations research journals. He is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

In honor of his many accomplishments, Richard E.Barlow was awarded the Von Neumann Prize of the Operations Research Society in 1991 jointly with Frank Proschan.