William Sealy Gosset | |
|---|---|
 William Sealy Gosset (akaStudent) in 1908 (age 32) | |
| Born | (1876-06-13)13 June 1876 Canterbury, Kent, England |
| Died | 16 October 1937(1937-10-16) (aged 61) Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Other names | Student |
| Alma mater | Winchester College,New College, Oxford |
| Known for | Student's t-distribution,statistical significance,design of experiments,Monte Carlo method,quality control,Modern synthesis,agricultural economics,econometrics |
| Children | 5, includingIsaac Henry Gosset |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Guinness Brewery |
William Sealy Gosset (13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937) was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who worked forGuinness. In statistics, he pioneered small sample experimental design. Gosset published under thepen nameStudent and developedStudent's t-distribution – originally called Student's "z" – and "Student's test ofstatistical significance".[1]
William Gosset was born inCanterbury, England the eldest son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, R.E.Royal Engineers. He attendedWinchester College before matriculating as Winchester Scholar innatural sciences and mathematics atNew College, Oxford.[1][2]
Upon graduating in 1899, he joined the brewery ofArthur Guinness & Son inDublin, Ireland; he spent the rest of his 38-year career at Guinness.[1][2]In 1904 he wrote an internal report for Guiness titled "The application of the law of error to work of the brewery". He had conducted experiments with only smallsample sizes and was aware that analysis was difficult, hence he recommended consulting mathematicians who were knowledgeable inprobability theory. In 1906-1907, Guinness sent him toKarl Pearson's laboratory atUniversity College London for two terms.[3]
Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship.[4] 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.[2]
In his job as Head Experimental Brewer at Guinness, Gosset developed new statistical methods – both in the brewery and on the farm – now central to the design of experiments, to proper use of significance testing on repeated trials, and to analysis ofeconomic significance (an early instance ofdecision theory interpretation of statistics) and more, such as his small-sample, stratified, and repeated balanced experiments onbarley for proving the bestyielding varieties.[5] Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, by trial and error, and by cooperating with others.[4]
Gosset's first publication came in 1907, "On the Error of Counting with aHaemocytometer," in which – unbeknownst to Gosset aka "Student" – he rediscovered thePoisson distribution.[5] After a Guinness researcher published a paper containing information that Guinness management feared might be useful to the company's competitors, it was decided that future publications by Guinness researchers must not mention beer, Guinness, or the author's true name.[4] Gosset may have taken his pen name "Student" from a notebook he kept in 1906 and 1907, "The Student's Science Notebook".[1][6] Thus his most noteworthy achievement is now called Student's, rather than Gosset's,t-distribution and test ofstatistical significance.[2]
Gosset published most of his 21 academic papers, includingThe probable error of a mean, in Pearson's journalBiometrika under the pseudonymStudent.[7] It was, however, not Pearson butRonald 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 bydegrees of freedom not totalsample 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".[5] In a special issue ofMetron in 1925 Student published the corrected tables, now calledStudent's t. In the same volume Fisher contributed applications of Student'st-distribution toregression analysis.[5]
Although introduced by others,Studentized residuals are named in Student's honour because, like the problem that led to Student's t-distribution, the idea of adjusting for estimated standard deviations is central to that concept.[8]
Gosset's interest in the cultivation of barley led him to speculate that thedesign 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.[9] 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.[4]
Gosset had three children withMarjory Gosset (née Phillpotts).Harry Gosset (1907–1965) was a consultant paediatrician; Bertha Marian Gosset (1909–2004) was a geographer and nurse; the youngest, Ruth Gosset (1911–1953) married the Oxford mathematician Douglas Roaf and had five children.
Gosset was a friend of bothPearson andFisher, a noteworthy achievement, for each had a massive ego and a loathing for the other. Gosset was a modest man who once cut short an admirer with this comment: "Fisher would have discovered it all anyway."[10]
In 1935, at the age of 59, Gosset leftDublin to take up the position of Head Brewer at a new and secondGuinness brewery atPark Royal in northwestern London. In September 1937, Gosset was promoted to Head Brewer of all Guinness. He died one month later, aged 61, inBeaconsfield, England, of a heart attack.[1]
Gosset:
