Nancy Robbins Mann is an American statistician known for her research on

quality management Total quality management, Total Quality management (TQM), ensures that an organization, product, or service consistently performs as intended, as opposed to Quality Management, which focuses on work process and procedure standards. It has four mai ...

reliability Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Computing * Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage * Reliability (computer networking), a category used to des ...

estimation, and the

Weibull distribution In probability theory and statistics, the Weibull distribution is a continuous probability distribution. It models a broad range of random variables, largely in the nature of a time to failure or time between events. Examples are maximum on ...

Education and career

Mann graduated from

Chillicothe High School Chillicothe ( ) is a city in Ross County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. The population was 22,059 at the 2020 census. Located along the Scioto River 45 miles (72 km) south of Columbus, Chillicothe was the first and third capita ...

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

in 1943. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

(UCLA) in 1948 and 1949, and then worked as computing staff in the National Applied Mathematics Laboratories of the

National Bureau of Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sc ...

. She returned to UCLA and completed a Ph.D. in

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) is a branch of statistics that applies statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...

there in 1965. Her doctoral dissertation was ''Point and Interval Estimates for Reliability Parameters when Failure Times Have the Two-parameter Weibull Distribution''. She later worked for

Rocketdyne Rocketdyne is an American rocket engine design and production company headquartered in Canoga Park, California, Canoga Park, in the western San Fernando Valley of suburban Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles, in southern California. Rocketdyne ...

, and conducted seminars on quality control through her organization Quality Education Seminars.

Books

With Ray E. Schafer and Nozer D. Singpurwalla, Mann wrote the book ''Methods for Statistical Analysis of Reliability and Life Data'' (Wiley, 1974). She is also the author of a book on the work of

W. Edwards Deming William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, and writer. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later ...

, ''The Keys to Excellence: The Story of the Deming Philosophy'' (Prestwick Books, 1985, reprinted as ''The Keys to Excellence: The Deming Philosophy of Quality Management'', Management Books, 2000).

Recognition

Mann was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The designation of ASA Fellow has been a sign ...

in 1970 "for her contributions to the theory of reliability, particularly for her research in the theory of point and interval estimation for the Weibull and extreme value distributions, and for her service to the profession as an Associate Editor of ''Technometrics''". She was selected to join the Chillicothe High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame in 2003.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mann, Nancy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American statisticians American women statisticians University of California, Los Angeles alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association