History and Etymology
In statistics, the t-distribution was first derived as a posterior distribution in 1876 by Helmert and Lüroth. In the English-language literature, a derivation of the t-distribution was published in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset while he worked at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland. One version of the origin of the pseudonym Student is that Gosset's employer forbade members of its staff from publishing scientific papers, so he had to hide his identity. Another version is that Guinness did not want their competition to know that they were using the t-test to test the quality of raw material. The t-test and the associated theory became well-known through the work of Ronald A. Fisher, who called the distribution "Student's distribution".
Read more about this topic: Student's t-distribution
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or etymology:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)