William Sealy Gosset was an English statistician born on June 13, 1876, and died on October 16, 1937. He is most famous for his work under the pseudonym Student, particularly his development of the Student's t-test and the Student's t-distribution, which are fundamental in statistical analysis.
Gosset was educated at Winchester College and then at New College, Oxford, where he studied chemistry and mathematics. After graduating in 1899 with a first-class degree in natural science, he joined Arthur Guinness Son & Company in Dublin, Ireland, as a brewer.
At Guinness, Gosset was involved in the brewery's research program, focusing on improving the quality and consistency of beer production. His work required statistical methods to analyze small samples, which were typical in brewery conditions where large samples were impractical or expensive. This need led him to develop methods for handling small sample sizes effectively:
Gosset's pseudonym "Student" was used to publish his findings because Guinness did not allow its employees to publish under their own names. This allowed him to share his work without revealing his employer's practices:
Gosset's work has had a lasting impact on the field of statistics: