William Gosset

William Gosset (Student)

William Sealy Gosset was born on June 11th 1876 in Canterbury, England. He assisted to the Winchester College studying chemistry and mathematics. After he graduated heworked at the Guinness Breweries in Dublin, an agrochemical business where he will be able to apply histatistical knowledge, so they can select the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset acquired theknowledge by study, trial and error, while he spent two seasons in the biometric laboratory of Karl Person. Gosset started working on papers addressing the concern with small samples, something inwhat Pearson wasn’t interested because he usually had hundreds of samples and there was no need to develop methods based on a few samples.
Another researcher at Guinness had previously published apaper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the containedinformation. Gosset wasn’t able to publishing anything under his name; therefore he used the nickname “Student” in his papers. His most famous work is known as “Student’s t distribution”, which mightbe otherwise “Gosset’s t distribution”.
Gosset’s papers were published including “The probable error of a mean” in Pearson’s journal, Biometrika. But the one who appreciated his work was R.A.Fisher. After Gosset had written to him to say I am sending you a copy of Student's Tables as you are the only man that's ever likely to use them! Fisher believed that Gosset had a “logical revolution”.Gosset's statistic was z= t/√(n-1) . Fisher introduced the t-form because it fit in with his theory of degrees of freedom. Fisher was also responsible for the applications of the t-distribution toregression.
Source:
E. S. Pearson (1990) ‘Student’, A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset, Editado y completado por R. L. Plackett con la ayuda de G. A. Barnard, Oxford: University Press....