Student's t-distribution - History and Etymology

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".