Student's t-test
History

The term " t -statistic" is abbreviated from "hypothesis test statistic". In statistics, the t -distribution was first derived as a posterior distribution in 1876 by Helmert and Lüroth. The t -distribution also appeared in a more general form as Pearson type IV distribution in Karl Pearson 's 1895 paper. However, the t -distribution, also known as Student's t -distribution, gets its name from William Sealy Gosset, who first published it in English in 1908 in the scientific journal Biometrika using the pseudonym "Student" because his employer preferred staff to use pen names when publishing scientific papers. Gosset worked at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was interested in the problems of small samples – for example, the chemical properties of barley with small sample sizes. Hence a second version of the etymology of the term Student is that Guinness did not want their competitors to know that they were using the t -test to determine the quality of raw material. Although it was William Gosset after whom the term "Student" is penned, it was actually through the work of Ronald Fisher that the distribution became well known as "Student's distribution" and "Student's t -test".

Gosset devised the t -test as an economical way to monitor the quality of stout. The t -test work was submitted to and accepted in the journal Biometrika and published in 1908.

Guinness had a policy of allowing technical staff leave for study (so-called "study leave"), which Gosset used during the first two terms of the 1906–1907 academic year in Professor Karl Pearson 's Biometric Laboratory at University College London. Gosset's identity was then known to fellow statisticians and to editor-in-chief Karl Pearson.
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