Is reliability a new science? A paper from the panel session held at the 10th International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability

Abstract The 10th International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability, MMR 2017, held in Grenoble, France during July 3‐7, entailed a panel discussion entitled “Is reliability a new science?” with Mark Brown, Regina Liu, William Meeker, Sheldon Ross, and Nozer Singpurwalla as panelists. Bill Meeker also doubled as a chair and as a moderator of the panel. The panel discussion was spawned by the recent appearance of a book by Professor Paolo Rocchi, Docent Emeritus of IBM, titled “Reliability is a new science: Gnedenko was right” published by Springer in 2017. The panel discussion was well attended and enthusiastically received and could serve as a forerunner to other such panel discussions at future MMR conferences. This paper presents some elements from the lively debate generated by this discussion.