Waloddi Weibull

Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull ( born June 18, 1887 † October 12, 1979 in Annecy ) was a Swedish engineer and mathematician.

Weibull came from a family that had immigrated in the 18th century from Schleswig -Holstein to Sweden. In 1904, he came as a midshipman to the Swedish Coast Guard, where he worked his way up to Major. During his years of service Weibull attended the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, where he graduated in 1924. Later Weibull received his doctoral degree at the University of Uppsala.

During several expeditions on the research vessel Albatross in 1914 in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean wrote Weibull a first publication on the propagation of blast waves and developed a method to examine thicknesses of sediments, and the nature of the seabed using explosion sources. The method of marine seismic found today in the petroleum exploration application.

Weibull in 1941 was appointed professor of technical physics at the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm. He wrote several treatises and publications, such as in the fields of material strength, fatigue or fracture behavior of solids. His best known research deals with the eponymous Weibull distribution, which proves to be very useful for example in connection with issues related to material fatigue of brittle bodies, the failure of electronic devices, or in statistical studies of wind speeds.