Probability Foundations for Engineers

by Joel A. Nachlas

Overview

This textbook will continue to be the best suitable textbook written specifically for a first course on probability theory and designed for industrial engineering and operations management students. The book offers theory in an accessible manner and includes numerous practical examples based on engineering applications.

Probability Foundations for Engineers, Second Edition continues to focus specifically on probability rather than probability and statistics. It offers a conversational presentation rather than a theorem or proof and includes examples based on engineering applications as it highlights Excel computations. This new edition presents a review of set theory and updates all descriptions, such as events versus outcomes, so that they are more understandable. Additional new material includes distributions such as beta and lognormal, a section on counting principles for defining probabilities, a section on mixture distributions and a pair of distribution summary tables.

Intended for undergraduate engineering students, this new edition textbook offers a foundational knowledge of probability. It is also useful to engineers already in the field who want to learn more about probability concepts. An updated solutions manual is available for qualified textbook adoptions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032278483
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joel Nachlas is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. He served on that faculty from 1974 until 2016. During his tenure in that department, he served as the coordinator for the department’s Operations Research faculty and curricula and was also the coordinator of the department’s international program. The foci of Dr. Nachlas research were the application of probability theory to reliability analysis and maintenance planning and of statistical methods to quality control. He earned the B.E.S. from at Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and the M.S. and Ph. D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1974 and 1976 respectively. All three of his degrees are in Industrial Engineering with a concentration in Operations Research. Dr. Nachlas has received numerous awards for his research including the 1991 P. K. McElroy Award and the 2004 Golomski Award. He continues to serve as the editor of the Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. He was a member of INFORMS and IISE and he is a Fellow of the Society of Reliability Engineers and a Fellow of the American Society for Quality. During his tenure at VT, Dr. Nachlas served for twenty years as a visiting professor at Ecole Polytechnique de Nice in France. While on the VT faculty, he served for 35 seasons as head coach of the Virginia Tech men’s lacrosse team and was selected in 2001 as the US Lacrosse MDIA national coach of the year.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction. 2. A Brief Review of Set Theory. 3. Probability Basics. 4. Random Variables and Distributions. 5. Joint, Marginal and Conditional Distributions. 6. Expectation and Functions of Random Variables. 7. Moment Generating Functions. 8. Approximations and Limiting Behavior.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

… responds to a need that I felt some years ago, which is to provide a basic and direct presentation of probability to engineers.
— Enrico Zio, Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento Energia, Milano Italy

I think this will make an excellent introductory book on probability for engineers and it will prepare the IE, CE and EE students for advanced courses that deal with random processes.
— Edward A. Pohl, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA

The theories are presented in a conversational rather than formal form as in most of the literature on probability. … introduces the reader in the field of randomness in a nice way. It gives a good starting point for more advanced studies. … creates a solid foundation to build up knowledge in more advanced statistical research. … The strength of the book is that it presents and translates the intuition concerning probability into mathematical structures using examples and explanations rather than traditional approach of theorem and proof. … perfect for undergraduate engineering students looking for a text book on probability.
— Prof. Uday Kumar, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

One of the distinctive feature (and one of its strength) of the book "probability foundations for engineers" is that it gives an in-depth and rigorous presentation of probability theory, while avoiding a classical mathematical – Theorems/Proofs- presentation. … As the author himself writes, he wants his book to be a supporting tool to go from intuition to mathematical rigor and this is certainly rewarding and fruitful from the pedagogical point of view. … The Approach of using everyday engineering intuition to introduce the basic notions of probabilities theory should make this book a valuable tool for engineering students who wants to learn the basic concepts and notions of probability theory and to be able to make use of these on engineering problems.
— Christophe Bereguer, Grenoble Institute of Technology, France

… this book takes a fresh approach to teaching undergraduate engineering students the fundamentals of probability. The book exploits students’ existing intuition regarding probabilistic concepts when presenting these concepts in a more rigorous manner. Students should be better able to retain the knowledge gained through reading this text because of the relevance of the examples and applications.
—Lisa Maillart, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Editorial Reviews

… responds to a need that I felt some years ago, which is to provide a basic and direct presentation of probability to engineers.
— Enrico Zio, Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento Energia, Milano Italy

I think this will make an excellent introductory book on probability for engineers and it will prepare the IE, CE and EE students for advanced courses that deal with random processes.
— Edward A. Pohl, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA

The theories are presented in a conversational rather than formal form as in most of the literature on probability. … introduces the reader in the field of randomness in a nice way. It gives a good starting point for more advanced studies. … creates a solid foundation to build up knowledge in more advanced statistical research. … The strength of the book is that it presents and translates the intuition concerning probability into mathematical structures using examples and explanations rather than traditional approach of theorem and proof. … perfect for undergraduate engineering students looking for a text book on probability.
— Prof. Uday Kumar, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

One of the distinctive feature (and one of its strength) of the book "probability foundations for engineers" is that it gives an in-depth and rigorous presentation of probability theory, while avoiding a classical mathematical – Theorems/Proofs- presentation. … As the author himself writes, he wants his book to be a supporting tool to go from intuition to mathematical rigor and this is certainly rewarding and fruitful from the pedagogical point of view. … The Approach of using everyday engineering intuition to introduce the basic notions of probabilities theory should make this book a valuable tool for engineering students who wants to learn the basic concepts and notions of probability theory and to be able to make use of these on engineering problems.
— Christophe Bereguer, Grenoble Institute of Technology, France

… this book takes a fresh approach to teaching undergraduate engineering students the fundamentals of probability. The book exploits students’ existing intuition regarding probabilistic concepts when presenting these concepts in a more rigorous manner. Students should be better able to retain the knowledge gained through reading this text because of the relevance of the examples and applications.
—Lisa Maillart, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

… responds to a need that I felt some years ago, which is to provide a basic and direct presentation of probability to engineers.
— Enrico Zio, Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento Energia, Milano Italy

I think this will make an excellent introductory book on probability for engineers and it will prepare the IE, CE and EE students for advanced courses that deal with random processes.
— Edward A. Pohl, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA

The theories are presented in a conversational rather than formal form as in most of the literature on probability. … introduces the reader in the field of randomness in a nice way. It gives a good starting point for more advanced studies. … creates a solid foundation to build up knowledge in more advanced statistical research. … The strength of the book is that it presents and translates the intuition concerning probability into mathematical structures using examples and explanations rather than traditional approach of theorem and proof. … perfect for undergraduate engineering students looking for a text book on probability.
— Prof. Uday Kumar, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

One of the distinctive feature (and one of its strength) of the book "probability foundations for engineers" is that it gives an in-depth and rigorous presentation of probability theory, while avoiding a classical mathematical – Theorems/Proofs- presentation. … As the author himself writes, he wants his book to be a supporting tool to go from intuition to mathematical rigor and this is certainly rewarding and fruitful from the pedagogical point of view. … The Approach of using everyday engineering intuition to introduce the basic notions of probabilities theory should make this book a valuable tool for engineering students who wants to learn the basic concepts and notions of probability theory and to be able to make use of these on engineering problems.
— Christophe Bereguer, Grenoble Institute of Technology, France

… this book takes a fresh approach to teaching undergraduate engineering students the fundamentals of probability. The book exploits students’ existing intuition regarding probabilistic concepts when presenting these concepts in a more rigorous manner. Students should be better able to retain the knowledge gained through reading this text because of the relevance of the examples and applications.
—Lisa Maillart, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

From the Publisher