- Author
- Galambos, J. | Lechner, J. A. | Simiu, E. | Hagwood, C.
- Title
- Extreme Value Theory and Applications: Proceedings of the Conference on Extreme Value Theory and Applications. Volume 3. Gaithersburg, Maryland. May 1993.
- Coporate
- Temple Univ., Philadelphia, PA National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
- NIST SP 866, August 1994, 242 p.
- Distribution
- AVAILABLE FROM Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20401-0003. Telephone: 202-512-1800. Website: http://www.gpo.gov
- Keywords
- extreme value theory | statistics | seismic risks | environment | wind | corrosion
- Abstract
- It appears that we live in an age of disasters: the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers flood millions of acres, earthquakes hit Tokyo and California, airplanes crash due to mechanical failure, and powerful windstorms cause increasingly costly damage. While these may seem to be unexpected phenomena to the man on the street, they are actually happening according to well defined rules of science known as extreme value theory. For many phenomena records must be broken in the future, so if a design is based on the worst case of the past then we are not really prepared for the future. Materials will fail due to fatigue: even if the body of an aircraft looks fine to the naked eye, it might suddenly fail if the aircraft has been in operation over an extended period of time. Extreme value theory has by now penetrated the social sciences, the medical profession, economics and even astronomy. We believe this field has come of age. To utilize and stimulate progress in the theory of extremes and promote its application, an international conference was organized in which equal weight was given to theory and practice.