BORIS V. GNEDENKO is Chairman of the Department of Probability Theory at Moscow University. Dr. Gnedenko, who received much of his mathematical training under Andrei Kolmogorov, is known for his outstanding contributions to the theory of limit distributions of ordered statistics, and limit theorems on the summation of random variables. For the last thirty years he has headed the Consulting Center on Reliability and Quality Control in Moscow, which he also founded. Dr. Gnedenko is the author of numerous papers and books on probability theory, reliability theory, and queuing theory.

IGOR A. USHAKOV, DSc, is the chief scientist at SOTAS, Inc. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Operations Research at George Washington University. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including Management Sciences, European Journal on Operations Research, and Kubernetes. Dr. Ushakov has published hundreds of papers and more than twenty books on operations research and reliability theory, including Handbook of Reliability Engineering, published by Wiley in 1994.