December 2008

The work The Probable Error of a Mean that led to today’s t-distribution was the lead article in the March 1908 issue of Biometrika. Its author was William Sealy Gosset [1876-1937], who -- for proprietary reasons -wrote under the pen name “Student.” With an Oxford degree in mathematics and chemistry, Gosset began work at the Guinness brewery in Dublin in 1899. Those who still misspell his surname today –as of this writing, the list includes the website of his own employer -- might find it easier to remember the correct spelling if they realized that the Gossets came from Huguenot stock, that the name on the family crest refers to “trois Goussés de fèves feuillées et tigées, et rangées, en pairle de meme” and that it was transmuted to Gosset when his forbears settled in the Channel Island of Jersey The first of his more than 20 statistical papers, published in 1907 while he was on sabbatical leave at Karl Pearson’s unit at University College, dealt with statistical variations in the counting of (yeast) cells. In it, he independently derived the Poisson distribution. Moreover, he used statistical techniques for correlations and goodness of fit developed by Pearson in the previous ten years to test the fit of this theoretical distribution to several sets of experimental data. In 1935, he moved back to his native England to set up a Guinness brewery in Park Royal in London. Gosset died at the age of 61 in 1937. His friend E S Beaven, a barley breeder, wrote an obituary in the London Times.