History
The field of extreme value theory was pioneered by Leonard Tippett (1902–1985). Tippett was employed by the British Cotton Industry Research Association, where he worked to make cotton thread stronger. In his studies, he realized that the strength of a thread was controlled by the strength of its weakest fibres. With the help of R. A. Fisher, Tippet obtained three asymptotic limits describing the distributions of extremes. Gumbel codified this theory in his 1958 book Statistics of Extremes, including the Gumbel distributions that bear his name.
A summary of historically important publications relating to extreme values theory can be found on the article List of publications in statistics.
Read more about this topic: Extreme Value Theory
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