Background

William Gosset was born on June 13, 1876, in Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom. He was the son of Colonel Frederic Gosset of the Royal Engineers, the descendant of an old Huguenot family that left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Education

Gosset was a scholar of Winchester, which shows that his exceptional mental powers had developed early. From Winchester, he went, again as a scholar, to New College, Oxford, where he obtained first-class degrees in mathematics and natural science.

Career

On leaving Oxford in the autumn of 1899 he joined the famous brewing firm of Guinness in Dublin. He remained with Guinness all his life.

At that time scientific methods and laboratory determinations were beginning to be seriously applied to brewing, and this naturally led Gosset to study error functions and to see the need for adequate methods to deal with small samples in examining the relations between the quality of the raw materials of beer, such as barley and hops, the conditions of production, and the finished article. The importance of controlling the quality of barley ultimately led him to study the design of agricultural field trials.

In 1904 he drew up for the directors the first report on “The Application of the Law of Error.” This emphasized the importance of the theory of probability in setting an exact value on the results of the experiments, many of which lead to results which were probable but not certain.

From 1906 to 1907 Gosset spent two terms in the Biometrics laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship. Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers, including the 1908 papers, but had little appreciation of their importance.

Gosset's first publication came in 1907, "On the Error of Counting with a Haemacytometer," in which he rediscovered the Poisson distribution. Gosset published most of his 21 academic papers, including "The probable error of a mean," in Pearson's journal Biometrika under the pseudonym Student. 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 a special issue of Metron in 1925 Student published the corrected tables, now called Student's t-distribution.

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. 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. Gosset's balanced principle was challenged by Ronald Fisher, who preferred randomized designs. 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.

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.

Achievements

• 

  William Gosset was a prominent chemist, brewer and a pioneer of modern statistics. He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Gosset also developed most famously Student's t-distribution and Student's test of statistical significance.

Personality

Gosset was not a profound mathematician but had a superb intuitive faculty that enabled him to grasp general principles and see their relevance to practical ends.

Connections

Father:

Colonel Frederic Gosset

Mother:

Agnes Sealy Vidal

Friend:

Karl Pearson

Friend:

Ronald Fisher

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• 'Student': A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset