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

quality management Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only ...

, reliability estimation, and the Weibull distribution.

Education and career

Mann graduated from

Chillicothe High School Chillicothe ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Ross County, Ohio, United States. Located along the Scioto River 45 miles (72 km) south of Columbus, Chillicothe was the first and third capital of Ohio. It is the only city in Ross Count ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

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 land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

(UCLA) in 1948 and 1949, and then worked as computing staff in the National Applied Mathematics Laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards. She returned to UCLA and completed a Ph.D. in

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of 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 experime ...

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, 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 engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical ...

, ''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 number of new fellows per year is limited ...

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 Women statisticians University of California, Los Angeles alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association