Traditions of the 150-year-old St. Petersburg School of Probability and Statis­ tics had been developed by many prominent scientists including P. L. Cheby­ chev, A. M. Lyapunov, A. A. Markov, S. N. Bernstein, and Yu. V. Linnik. In 1948,...

This book provides a fresh approach to reliability theory, an area that has gained increasing relevance in fields from statistics and engineering to demography and insurance. Its innovative use of quantile functions gives an analysis of...