William Sealy Gosset (June 11, 1876 - October 16,

1937)…….( one thousand eight hundred seventy-

six…….(one thousand nine hundred thirty-
seven)
was a (esteician) statistician, best known by his
literary nickname Student. Born in Canterbury, the
son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic
Gosset, he attended the famous private school
winchester college, before studying chemistry and
mathematics at New College, Oxford. After
graduating in 1899, (one thousand eight hundred
ninety-nine)
he joined the Arthur Guinness and Son Distillery in
Dublin.

Guinness was a progressive agrochemical business

and Gosset could apply his statistical knowledge to
both the distillery and the farm (to select the best
varieties of barley. Gosset acquired that knowledge
through study, trial and error as well as spending
two seasons during 1906/7 in Karl Pearson's
biochemical laboratory. Gosset and Pearson had a
good relationship and the latter helped Gosset with
the mathematics of his papers. Pearson contributed
to the 1908 papers, but did not appreciate their
importance enough. The papers were about
importance. of the small samples for the distillery,
whereas the biologist usually had hundreds of
observations and did not see the urgency in
developing methods based on a few samples.

Another Guinness researcher had previously

published an article containing the distillery's trade
secrets. To prevent future exposures of confidential
information, Guinness prohibited its employees
from publishing articles regardless of the
information they contained. This meant that Gosset
could not publish his work using his own name.
Hence the use of his pseudonym Student in his
posts, to avoid being detected by his employer.
Therefore, his most famous achievement is now
known as the Student's t-distribution, which would
otherwise have been the Gosset t-distribution.
Using this pseudonym, Pearson published The
Probable Error of a Mean and almost all of Gosset's
articles in his journal Biometrika. However, it was
R.A. Fisher who appreciated the importance of
Gosset's work on small samples, after receiving
correspondence from Gosset saying 'I am sending
you a copy of the Student Tables, as you are the
only person who will probably ever use them!
Fisher believed that Gosset had made a "logical
revolution." Ironically, the t-statistic that Gosset is
famous for was actually Fisher's brainchild. The
Gosset statistic was z = t / √ (n - 1). Fisher
introduced the t form because it conformed to his
theory of degrees of freedom. Fisher is also
responsible for applying the t-distribution to
regression.

Although introduced by others, the studentized

residuals are named after Student because, as with
the problem that led to the Student's t distribution,
the idea of fitting using the estimated standard
deviations was the basis of the concept.

In 1935 he left Dublin to take up the post of Head

Brewer, in charge of the scientific part of the
production, at the new Guinness distillery in
London. He died in Beaconsfield, England.
Gosset was friends with both Pearson and Fisher, a
great achievement, as both professed intense
contempt for each other. Gosset was a modest man
who cut off a fan with the comment "Fisher would
have found out anyway."