William s gossett biography of williams family

Better known by his pseudonym, Student , Gosset's name is associated with the discovery of the t -distribution and its use, and he had a profound effect on the practice of statistics in industry and agriculture. William Sealy Gosset was born in Canterbury, England. He died in Beaconsfield, England at the age of 61, still in the employ of Guinness.

By the circumstances of his work, Gosset was led early in his career at Guinness to examine the relationship between the raw materials for beer and the finished product, and this activity naturally led him to learn the tools of statistical analysis. In , Gosset sought out the advice of Karl Pearson and subsequently spent the better part of a year, in , in Pearson's Biometric Laboratory at University College London, where he worked on small sample statistics problems.

Gosset then produced a pair of papers that were published in Biometrika in , under the nom de plume, Student. The first of these derived what we now know as Student s' t -distribution, and the second dealt with the small sample distribution of Pearson's correlation coefficient. These contributions placed Gosset among the great men of the newly emerging field of statistical methodology.

William s gossett biography of williams family: William Sealy Gosset (13 June

In fact, the t -test based on his paper is perhaps the single most widely used statistical tool in applications. In the years that followed, Gosset worked on a variety of statistical problems in agriculture, including experiments. He was in active correspondence with the leading English statisticians of his day, including Karl Pearson, Egon Pearson , and R.