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10 May 2006

An Intoxicating Story

From Wikipedia's entry on the t-test:

The t-statistic was invented by William Sealy Gosset for cheaply monitoring the quality of beer brews. "Student" was his pen name. Gosset was statistician for Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland, hired due to Claude Guinness's innovative policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge for applying biochemistry and statistics to Guinness's industrial processes. Gosset published the t-test in Biometrika in 1908, but was forced to use a pen name by his employer who regarded the fact that they were using statistics as a trade secret. In fact, Gosset's identity was unknown not only to fellow statisticians but to his employer - the company insisted on the pseudonym so that it could turn a blind eye to the breach of its rules. Today, it is more generally applied to the confidence that can be placed in judgements made from small samples.

I like the way they think.

Posted by Andrew C. Thomas at 6:00 AM