Waloddi Weibull. was born on June 18, 1887 in Sweden. From 1904 to 1940, Weibull served in the Royal Swedish Coast Guard, rising to the rank of Major. During this time he also studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and at the University of Uppsalla, where he earned a doctorate degree in 1932. In 1941 Weibull received a research professorship in physics at the Royal Institute of Technology. He also worked as a consulting engineer to numerous Swedish and German industries, including SAAB and BOFORS.
Weibull published extensively in the general area of materials science, including studies on the strength of materials, fatigue and rupture in solids, and properties of ball and roller bearings. The probability distribution named after him was studied in his paper A Statistical Distribution Function of Wide Applicability, published in the Journal of Applied Mechanics in 1951. The Weibull family of distributions is immensely popular in reliability theory, because it includes distributions of decreasing, constant, and increasing failure rates.
Weibull received the Gold Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1972, and the Great Gold Medal from the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1978 (awarded personally by King Carl XVI Gustav). He died on October 12, 1979 in Annecy, France.