Guinness Beer and Statistics

 

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Student's t-test is a common statistical test using the t-distribution developed by William Gosset. William Gosset. Gosset worked at the Guinness brewery in Dublin and his employer preferred that staff use pen names when publishing scientific papers, so in 1908 he published under the pseudonym, Student, when his work was published in the journal, Biometrika.

The t-distribution is used when one has small sample sizes. The distribution has a bell-shape like the normal distribution but is wider at the tails. 

In May, 2024, Scientific America published an opinion piece about this important contribution to the field of statistics: How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science: How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science.