Beer and Statistics: William Sealy Gosset

What’s the link between beer and statistics? Ans: William Sealy Gosset

I recently visited the Guinness brewery whilst in Dublin to run the marathon for Cancer Research. Whilst there I happened across this plaque – check out the photograph above. It commemerated the life and work of William Sealy Gosset who was best known by his pen name Student and for his work on Student’s t-distribution.

It’s listed in Minitab as the paired t-test procedure is used to compare the mean difference between two populations when you believe that some dependency exists. Is a hypothesis test for the mean difference between paired observations that are related or dependent. The paired t-test is useful for analyzing differences between twins, differences in before-and-after measurements on the same subject, and differences between two treatments given to the same subject.

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Born in Canterbury, England to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, Gosset attended Winchester College, the famous private school, before reading chemistry and mathematics at New College, Oxford. On graduating in 1899, he joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son.

Guinness was a progressive agro-chemical business and Gosset would apply his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm-to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, trial and error and by spending two terms in 1906-7 in the biometric laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship and Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers. Pearson helped with the 1908 papers but he had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer’s concern with small samples, while the biometrician typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.

Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. This meant that Gosset was unable to publish his works under his own name. He therefore used the pseudonym Student for his publications to avoid their detection by his employer. Thus his most famous achievement is now referred to as Student’s t-distribution, which might otherwise have been Gosset’s t-distribution.

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Gosset’s interest in barley cultivation led him to speculate that design of experiments should aim, not only at improving the average yield, but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive (robust) to variation in soil and climate. This principle only occurs in the later thought of Fisher and then in the work of Genichi Taguchi in the 1950s.

In 1935, he left Dublin to take up the position of Head Brewer, in charge of the scientific side of production, at a new Guinness brewery at Park Royal in North West London. He died in Beaconsfield, England of a heart attack.

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Comments

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