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.