William Sealy Gosset

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William Sealy Gosset, 1908

William Sealy Gosset (born June 13, 1876 in Canterbury , † October 16, 1937 in Beaconsfield ) was an English statistician . He published under the pseudonym Student .

His main work resulted in the Student's t-distribution and the t-test , which allows the statistician to check whether the two mean values ​​of two samples differ significantly or not.

The concept of studentization also goes back to him.

Life

Gosset was born to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset and attended Winchester College . He studied chemistry and mathematics at New College , Oxford. After completing his studies in 1899, he started working for the Arthur Guinness & Son brewery in Dublin .

Guinness was an advanced agro-chemical company, and Gosset applied his statistical knowledge to both brewing and agriculture - to get the best barley quality for beer production. William Gosset acquired this skill in 1906/1907 through studies and experiments in Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory . Gosset and Pearson were on good terms with each other, and Pearson helped with the mathematical legwork in Gosset's writings. Pearson also helped with his 1908 studies, but paid little attention to their importance: This work dealt with small sample sizes - a typical problem in a brewery, while a biometrician can usually use hundreds of samples and therefore no special methods for small sample sizes needed.

Another scientist at the Guinness brewery had published a work which - to the detriment of the brewery - contained trade secrets. To prevent further leakage of confidential information, the brewery forbade its employees from publishing any work. For Gosset this meant that he had to publish under a pseudonym; he chose "student". Its greatest achievement, the t-distribution, is therefore known as the “Student's t-distribution”.

Gosset published almost all of his publications under his pseudonym, also The probable error of a mean , which appeared in Pearson's journal Biometrika . However, it was not Pearson but statistician Ronald Aylmer Fisher who recognized the importance of Gosset's work on small sample sizes. Fisher believed that Gosset was bringing about a "logical revolution". Ironically, the t-test that Gosset is famous for is Fisher's creation. Gosset's formula was ; and Fisher introduced the t-shape because it was consistent with his theory of degrees of freedom . Fisher was also responsible for applying the t-distribution to the regression calculation .

Gosset's interest in barley cultivation led him to think that agricultural experiments should not only improve the average yield, but also lead to barley varieties that are more robust and less sensitive to soil and climate. This principle appears much later in the works of Fisher and then in those of Genichi Taguchi in the 1950s.

In 1935 Gosset left Dublin to take on a scientific leadership position in the new Guinness brewery in London. He died of a heart attack in Beaconsfield in 1937.

Fonts

  • Student (1908): The Probable Error of a Mean. In: Biometrika. Volume 6, Issue 1. 1908, pp. 1-25

literature

  • ES Pearson : Student - A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset. Oxford 1990

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gosset, William Sealy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Student (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English statistician
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Canterbury
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1937
Place of death Beaconsfield