William The t Distribution Known as Students t

William The t Distribution: Known as Student’s t

William Sealy Gosset (1908)

Gosset’s Background �Gosset studied math and chemistry at Oxford. �He then was recruited to work at the Arthur Guinness Brewery in Dublin. �While working at the brewery, he tested many small samples of beer, hoping to find a perfect method for creating the perfect stout beer. �He used a z distribution at first to test his samples and discovered that his conclusions were off. �He searched for another method that would yield more accurate results since his samples were so small.

Gosset �Gosset was a statistician at heart but also had an interest in cultivating barley. �It is interesting how his intelligence and intuition helped a company like Guinness produce high quality stout. �Who would have thought such an important distribution in statistics would be discovered in a brewery?

T Distribution �He ended up “creating” a new model called the t distribution. �This is what his sampling distribution had followed. �He used the sample standard deviation S instead of the population standard deviation. �He followed what he called a family of curves based on degrees of freedom. �The degrees of freedom is n – 1 where n is the sample size.

Student’s t Distribution �At the Guinness Brewery, there was a paper published by another researcher, which had supposedly revealed the secrets of the brewery. �For this reason, Gosset has to persuade the owners to let him publish his work and had promised that the t distribution would not reveal any secrets about the way they had made their stout. The owner agreed but forced him to use a pseudonym. That’s how the term Student’s t Distribution came to be. �In the end, another mathematician named Fisher received much of the glory for Gosset’s work. They had worked together but it was Fisher who discovered the t statistic.