William Sealy Gosset (13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937) was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who worked for Guinness. In statistics, he pioneered small-sample experimental design. Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed Student's t-distribution – originally called Student's "z" – and "Student's test of statistical significance".

Career

Upon graduating in 1899, he joined the brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son in Dublin, Ireland; he spent the rest of his 38-year career at Guinness.

Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship. Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers, including the 1908 papers, but had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer's concern with small samples; biometricians like Pearson, on the other hand, typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, by trial and error, and by cooperating with others. Thus his most noteworthy achievement is now called Student's, rather than Gosset's, t-distribution and test of statistical significance. It was, however, not Pearson but Ronald A. Fisher who appreciated the understudied importance of Gosset's small-sample work. Fisher wrote to Gosset in 1912, explaining that Student's z-distribution should be divided by degrees of freedom and not total sample size. From 1912 to 1934 Gosset and Fisher would exchange more than 150 letters. In 1924, Gosset wrote in a letter to Fisher, "I am sending you a copy of Student's Tables as you are the only man that's ever likely to use them!" Fisher believed that Gosset had effected a "logical revolution".

Gosset's interest in the cultivation of barley led him to speculate that the design of experiments should aim not only at improving the average yield but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive to variation in soil and climate (that is, "robust"). Gosset called his innovation "balanced layout", because treatments and controls are allocated in a balanced fashion to stratified growing conditions, such as differential soil fertility. Gosset's balanced principle was challenged by Ronald Fisher, who preferred randomized designs. The Bayesian Harold Jeffreys, and Gosset's close associates Jerzy Neyman and Egon S. Pearson sided with Gosset's balanced designs of experiments; however, as Ziliak (2014) has shown, Gosset and Fisher would strongly disagree for the rest of their lives about the meaning and interpretation of balanced versus randomized experiments, as they had earlier clashed on the role of bright-line rules of statistical significance.

In 1935, at the age of 59, Gosset left Dublin to take up the position of Head Brewer at a new and second Guinness brewery at Park Royal in northwestern London. In September 1937, Gosset was promoted to Head Brewer of all Guinness. He died one month later, aged 61, in Beaconsfield, England, of a heart attack.

Bibliography

Gosset:

  • "The application of the 'law of error' to the work of the Brewery" (1904, Guinness internal report)
  • "Evolution By Selection: The Implications of Winter's Selection Experiment", 1933, Eugenics Review, 24, pg293
  • Students Collected Papers (edited by E.S. Pearson and John Wishart, with a foreword by Launce McMullen), London: Biometrika Office. (1942)

References

Further reading

;Biographies

  • E. S. Pearson (1990) Student', A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset, Edited and Augmented by R. L. Plackett with the Assistance of G. A. Barnard, Oxford: University Press. .
  • Beaven 1947, Barley: Fifty Years of Observation and Experiment
  • Biography by Heinz Kohler
  • Student's T Distribution
  • Earliest known uses of some of the words of mathematics: S under the heading of "Student's t-distribution", describes briefly how Student's z became t.