We reexamine several common assumptions about fracture strength, utilizing large-scale
simulations of a fuse network model and applying both renormalization-group and
nucleation theory methods. Statistical distributions of fracture strengths are believed to be
universal and material independent. The universal Weibull and Gumbel distributions
emerge as a consequence of the``weakest-link hypothesis''and have been studied in the
classical theory of extreme value statistics. These distributions are also the fixed points of a …