History Statistic

The t statistic was introduced in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, a statistician working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland ("Student" was his pen name).[1][2] Gosset had been hired due to Claude Guinness's innovative policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to apply biochemistry and statistics to Guinness' industrial processes.[2] Gosset devised the t-test as a way to cheaply monitor the quality of beer. He published the test in Biometrika in 1908, but was forced to use a pen name by his employer, who regarded the fact that they were using statistics as a trade secret. In fact, Gosset's identity was known to fellow statisticians.[3]

Today, the t-test is more generally applied to the confidence that can be placed in judgments made from small samples.