  In order to understand the dynamical and chemical evolution of our Galaxy it
is of fundamental importance to study the local neighborhood. White dwarf stars
are ideal candidates to probe the history of the solar neighborhood, since
these ``fossil'' stars have very long evolutionary time-scales and, at the same
time, their evolution is relatively well understood. In fact, the white dwarf
luminosity function has been used for this purpose by several authors. However,
a long standing problem arises from the relatively poor statistics of the
samples, especially at low luminosities. In this paper we assess the
statistical reliability of the white dwarf luminosity function by using a Monte
Carlo approach.
