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William Sealy Gosset

August 25, 2023

William Sealy Gosset (13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937) was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who served as Head Brewer of Guinness and Head Experimental Brewer of Guinness and was a pioneer of modern statistics. He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed most famously Student's t-distribution – originally called Student's "z" – and "Student's test of statistical significance".[1]

William Sealy Gosset
William Sealy Gosset (aka Student) in 1908 (age 32)
Born(1876-06-13)13 June 1876
Canterbury, Kent, England
Died16 October 1937(1937-10-16) (aged 61)
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Other namesStudent
Alma materNew College, Oxford, Winchester College
Known forStudent's t-distribution, statistical significance, design of experiments, Monte Carlo method, quality control, Modern synthesis, agricultural economics, econometrics
Children5, including Isaac Henry Gosset
Scientific career
InstitutionsGuinness Brewery
InfluencesWilliam Archibald Spooner, Karl Pearson
InfluencedRonald A. Fisher, Harold Jeffreys, Egon Pearson, Jerzy Neyman, John Wishart, W. Edwards Deming, Edwin S. Beaven, Herbert Hunter

Life and career Edit

Born in Canterbury, England the eldest son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, R.E. Royal Engineers, Gosset attended Winchester College before matriculating as Winchester Scholar in natural sciences and mathematics at New College, Oxford. 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.[1][2]

Gosset had three children with Marjory 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.

In his job as Head Experimental Brewer at Guinness, the self-trained 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 of economic significance (an early instance of decision theory interpretation of statistics) and more, such as his small-sample, stratified, and repeated balanced experiments on barley for proving the best yielding varieties.[3] Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, by trial and error, by cooperating with others, and by spending two terms in 1906–1907 in the Biometrics laboratory of Karl Pearson.[4] 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]

Gosset's first publication came in 1907, "On the Error of Counting with a Haemacytometer," in which – unbeknownst to Gosset aka "Student" – he rediscovered the Poisson distribution.[3] Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. The economic historian Stephen Ziliak discovered in the Guinness Archives that to prevent further disclosure of confidential information, the Guinness Board of Directors allowed its scientists to publish research on condition that they do not mention "1) beer, 2) Guinness, or 3) their own surname".[4] To Ziliak, Gosset seems to have gotten his pen name "Student" from his 1906–1907 notebook on counting yeast cells with a haemacytometer, "The Student's Science Notebook"[1][5] Thus his most noteworthy achievement is now called Student's, rather than Gosset's, t-distribution and test of statistical significance.[2]

 
Plaque in the Guinness Storehouse Commemorating Gosset.

Gosset published most of his 21 academic papers, including The probable error of a mean, in Pearson's journal Biometrika under the pseudonym Student.[6] 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 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".[3] In a special issue of Metron in 1925 Student published the corrected tables, now called Student's t  . In the same volume Fisher contributed applications of Student's t-distribution to regression analysis.[3]

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.[7]

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.[8] 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]

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.[1]

Gosset was a friend of both Pearson and Fisher, a noteworthy achievement, for each had a massive ego and a loathing for the other. He was a modest man who once cut short an admirer with this comment: "Fisher would have discovered it all anyway."[9]

See also Edit

Bibliography Edit

Gosset:

  • "The application of the 'law of error' to the work of the Brewery" (1904, Guinness internal report)
  • "On the error of counting with hæmacytometer". Biometrika. 5 (3): 351–360. February 1907. doi:10.1093/biomet/5.3.351.
  • "The probable error of a mean" (PDF). Biometrika. 6 (1): 1–25. March 1908. doi:10.1093/biomet/6.1.1. hdl:10338.dmlcz/143545.
  • "Probable error of a correlation coefficient". Biometrika. 6 (2/3): 302–310. September 1908. doi:10.1093/biomet/6.2-3.302.
  • "The distribution of the means of samples which are not drawn at random". Biometrika. 7 (1/2): 210–214. July–October 1909. doi:10.1093/biomet/7.1-2.210.
  • "An experimental determination of the probable error of Dr Spearman's correlation coefficients". Biometrika. 13 (2/3): 263–282. July 1921. doi:10.1093/biomet/13.2-3.263.
  • "Review of Statistical Methods for Research Workers (R. A. Fisher)". Eugenics Review. 18: 148–150. 1926.
  • Zabell, S. L (March 2008). "On Student's 1908 Article "The Probable Error of a Mean" (S.L. Zabell)" (PDF). Journal of the American Statistical Association. 103 (481): 1–7. doi:10.1198/016214508000000030. S2CID 48322195.
  • "Evolution By Selection: The Implications of Winter's Selection Experiment", 1933, Eugenics Review, 24, pg293
  • 'Student's' Collected Papers (edited by E.S. Pearson and John Wishart, with a foreword by Launce McMullen), London: Biometrika Office. (1942)

References Edit

  1. ^ a b c d Ziliak, Stephen T. (2008). "Retrospectives: Guinnessometrics: The Economic Foundation of "Student's" T". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 22 (4): 199–216. doi:10.1257/jep.22.4.199.
  2. ^ a b c "BIOGRAPHY 12.1 William S. Gosset (1876–1937)". Retrieved 11 January 2015. The site cites Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1972), pp. 476–477; International Encyclopedia of Statistics, vol. I (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 409–413.
  3. ^ a b c d Ziliak, S.; D. McCloskey (2008). The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives. University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/mpub.186351. ISBN 978-0-472-07007-7.
  4. ^ a b c d Stephen T. Ziliak (2019). "How Large Are Your G-Values? Try Gosset's Guinnessometrics when a Little "p" is Not Enough". The American Statistician. 73: 281–290. doi:10.1080/00031305.2018.1514325. S2CID 127347145.
  5. ^ Hotelling, H. (1930). "British Statistics and Statisticians Today" (PDF). Journal of the American Statistical Association. 25 (170): 186–190. doi:10.1080/01621459.1930.10503118. JSTOR 2277631.
  6. ^ M Wendl (2016). "Pseudonymous fame". Science. 351 (6280): 1406. Bibcode:2016Sci...351.1406W. doi:10.1126/science.351.6280.1406. PMID 27013722.
  7. ^ Ziliak, Stephen T. (2011). "W.S. Gosset and Some Neglected Concepts in Experimental Statistics: Guinnessometrics II" (PDF). Journal of Wine Economics. 6 (2): 252–277. doi:10.1017/S1931436100001632. S2CID 12175939.
  8. ^ Ziliak, Stephen T. (2014). "Balanced versus Randomized Field Experiments in Economics: Why W. S. Gosset aka "Student" Matters" (PDF). Review of Behavioral Economics. 1 (1–2): 167–208. doi:10.1561/105.00000008.
  9. ^ Salsburg, David (2002). The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 0-8050-7134-2.

Further reading Edit

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. ISBN 978-0-19-852227-0.
  • Pearson, E. S. (1939). "'Student' as Statistician" (PDF). Biometrika. 30 (3/4): 210–250. doi:10.1093/biomet/30.3-4.210.
  • Beaven 1947, Barley: Fifty Years of Observation and Experiment

External links Edit

August 25, 2023
william, sealy, gosset, june, 1876, october, 1937, english, statistician, chemist, brewer, served, head, brewer, guinness, head, experimental, brewer, guinness, pioneer, modern, statistics, pioneered, small, sample, experimental, design, analysis, with, econom. William Sealy Gosset 13 June 1876 16 October 1937 was an English statistician chemist and brewer who served as Head Brewer of Guinness and Head Experimental Brewer of Guinness and was a pioneer of modern statistics He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed most famously Student s t distribution originally called Student s z and Student s test of statistical significance 1 William Sealy GossetWilliam Sealy Gosset aka Student in 1908 age 32 Born 1876 06 13 13 June 1876Canterbury Kent EnglandDied16 October 1937 1937 10 16 aged 61 Beaconsfield Buckinghamshire EnglandOther namesStudentAlma materNew College Oxford Winchester CollegeKnown forStudent s t distribution statistical significance design of experiments Monte Carlo method quality control Modern synthesis agricultural economics econometricsChildren5 including Isaac Henry GossetScientific careerInstitutionsGuinness BreweryInfluencesWilliam Archibald Spooner Karl PearsonInfluencedRonald A Fisher Harold Jeffreys Egon Pearson Jerzy Neyman John Wishart W Edwards Deming Edwin S Beaven Herbert Hunter Contents 1 Life and career 2 See also 3 Bibliography 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External linksLife and career EditBorn in Canterbury England the eldest son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset R E Royal Engineers Gosset attended Winchester College before matriculating as Winchester Scholar in natural sciences and mathematics at New College Oxford Upon graduating in 1899 he joined the brewery of Arthur Guinness amp Son in Dublin Ireland he spent the rest of his 38 year career at Guinness 1 2 Gosset had three children with Marjory Gosset nee 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 In his job as Head Experimental Brewer at Guinness the self trained 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 of economic significance an early instance of decision theory interpretation of statistics and more such as his small sample stratified and repeated balanced experiments on barley for proving the best yielding varieties 3 Gosset acquired that knowledge by study by trial and error by cooperating with others and by spending two terms in 1906 1907 in the Biometrics laboratory of Karl Pearson 4 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 Gosset s first publication came in 1907 On the Error of Counting with a Haemacytometer in which unbeknownst to Gosset aka Student he rediscovered the Poisson distribution 3 Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery The economic historian Stephen Ziliak discovered in the Guinness Archives that to prevent further disclosure of confidential information the Guinness Board of Directors allowed its scientists to publish research on condition that they do not mention 1 beer 2 Guinness or 3 their own surname 4 To Ziliak Gosset seems to have gotten his pen name Student from his 1906 1907 notebook on counting yeast cells with a haemacytometer The Student s Science Notebook 1 5 Thus his most noteworthy achievement is now called Student s rather than Gosset s t distribution and test of statistical significance 2 Plaque in the Guinness Storehouse Commemorating Gosset Gosset published most of his 21 academic papers including The probable error of a mean in Pearson s journal Biometrika under the pseudonym Student 6 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 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 3 In a special issue of Metron in 1925 Student published the corrected tables now called Student s t z t n 1 textstyle z frac t sqrt n 1 In the same volume Fisher contributed applications of Student s t distribution to regression analysis 3 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 7 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 8 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 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 1 Gosset was a friend of both Pearson and Fisher a noteworthy achievement for each had a massive ego and a loathing for the other He was a modest man who once cut short an admirer with this comment Fisher would have discovered it all anyway 9 See also EditIsaac Henry GossetBibliography EditGosset The application of the law of error to the work of the Brewery 1904 Guinness internal report On the error of counting with haemacytometer Biometrika 5 3 351 360 February 1907 doi 10 1093 biomet 5 3 351 The probable error of a mean PDF Biometrika 6 1 1 25 March 1908 doi 10 1093 biomet 6 1 1 hdl 10338 dmlcz 143545 Probable error of a correlation coefficient Biometrika 6 2 3 302 310 September 1908 doi 10 1093 biomet 6 2 3 302 The distribution of the means of samples which are not drawn at random Biometrika 7 1 2 210 214 July October 1909 doi 10 1093 biomet 7 1 2 210 An experimental determination of the probable error of Dr Spearman s correlation coefficients Biometrika 13 2 3 263 282 July 1921 doi 10 1093 biomet 13 2 3 263 Review of Statistical Methods for Research Workers R A Fisher Eugenics Review 18 148 150 1926 Zabell S L March 2008 On Student s 1908 Article The Probable Error of a Mean S L Zabell PDF Journal of the American Statistical Association 103 481 1 7 doi 10 1198 016214508000000030 S2CID 48322195 Evolution By Selection The Implications of Winter s Selection Experiment 1933 Eugenics Review 24 pg293 Student s Collected Papers edited by E S Pearson and John Wishart with a foreword by Launce McMullen London Biometrika Office 1942 References Edit a b c d Ziliak Stephen T 2008 Retrospectives Guinnessometrics The Economic Foundation of Student s T Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 4 199 216 doi 10 1257 jep 22 4 199 a b c BIOGRAPHY 12 1 William S Gosset 1876 1937 Retrieved 11 January 2015 The site cites Dictionary of Scientific Biography New York Scribner s 1972 pp 476 477 International Encyclopedia of Statistics vol I New York Free Press 1978 pp 409 413 a b c d Ziliak S D McCloskey 2008 The Cult of Statistical Significance How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs Justice and Lives University of Michigan Press doi 10 3998 mpub 186351 ISBN 978 0 472 07007 7 a b c d Stephen T Ziliak 2019 How Large Are Your G Values Try Gosset s Guinnessometrics when a Little p is Not Enough The American Statistician 73 281 290 doi 10 1080 00031305 2018 1514325 S2CID 127347145 Hotelling H 1930 British Statistics and Statisticians Today PDF Journal of the American Statistical Association 25 170 186 190 doi 10 1080 01621459 1930 10503118 JSTOR 2277631 M Wendl 2016 Pseudonymous fame Science 351 6280 1406 Bibcode 2016Sci 351 1406W doi 10 1126 science 351 6280 1406 PMID 27013722 Ziliak Stephen T 2011 W S Gosset and Some Neglected Concepts in Experimental Statistics Guinnessometrics II PDF Journal of Wine Economics 6 2 252 277 doi 10 1017 S1931436100001632 S2CID 12175939 Ziliak Stephen T 2014 Balanced versus Randomized Field Experiments in Economics Why W S Gosset aka Student Matters PDF Review of Behavioral Economics 1 1 2 167 208 doi 10 1561 105 00000008 Salsburg David 2002 The Lady Tasting Tea How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century Holt Paperbacks ISBN 0 8050 7134 2 Further reading EditBiographiesE 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 ISBN 978 0 19 852227 0 Pearson E S 1939 Student as Statistician PDF Biometrika 30 3 4 210 250 doi 10 1093 biomet 30 3 4 210 Beaven 1947 Barley Fifty Years of Observation and ExperimentExternal links EditBiography 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 O Connor John J Robertson Edmund F William Sealy Gosset MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive University of St Andrews Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title William Sealy Gosset amp oldid 1170971671, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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