William Sealy Gosset
William Sealy Gosset | |
---|---|
Born | Canterbury, Kent, England | 13 June 1876
Died | 16 October 1937 Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England | (aged 61)
Other names | Student |
Alma mater | New College, Oxford, Winchester College |
Known for | Student's t-distribution, statistical significance, design of experiments, Monte Carlo method, quality control, Modern synthesis, agricultural economics, econometrics |
Children | 5, including Isaac Henry Gosset |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Guinness Brewery |
William Sealy Gosset (13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937) was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who served as
Life and career
Born in
Gosset had three children with Marjory Gosset (née Phillpotts). Harry Gosset (1907–1965) was a consultant paediatrician; Bertha Marian Gosset (1909–2004) was a geographer and nurse; the youngest, Ruth Gosset (1911–1953) married the Oxford mathematician Douglas Roaf and had five children.
In his job as Head Experimental Brewer at Guinness, the self-trained Gosset developed new statistical methods – both in the brewery and on the farm – now central to the design of experiments, to proper use of significance testing on repeated trials, and to analysis of economic significance (an early instance of decision theory interpretation of statistics) and more, such as his small-sample, stratified, and repeated balanced experiments on barley for proving the best yielding varieties.[3] Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, by trial and error, by cooperating with others, and by spending two terms in 1906–1907 in the Biometrics laboratory of Karl Pearson.[4] Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship.[4] Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers, including the 1908 papers, but had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer's concern with small samples; biometricians like Pearson, on the other hand, typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.[2]
Gosset's first publication came in 1907, "On the Error of Counting with a
Gosset published most of his 21 academic papers, including The probable error of a mean, in Pearson's journal
Although introduced by others, Studentized residuals are named in Student's honour because, like the problem that led to Student's t-distribution, the idea of adjusting for estimated standard deviations is central to that concept.[7]
Gosset's interest in the cultivation of barley led him to speculate that the design of experiments should aim not only at improving the average yield but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive to variation in soil and climate (that is, "robust"). Gosset called his innovation "balanced layout", because treatments and controls are allocated in a balanced fashion to stratified growing conditions, such as differential soil fertility.[8] Gosset's balanced principle was challenged by Ronald Fisher, who preferred randomized designs. The Bayesian Harold Jeffreys, and Gosset's close associates Jerzy Neyman and Egon S. Pearson sided with Gosset's balanced designs of experiments; however, as Ziliak (2014) has shown, Gosset and Fisher would strongly disagree for the rest of their lives about the meaning and interpretation of balanced versus randomized experiments, as they had earlier clashed on the role of bright-line rules of statistical significance.[4]
In 1935, at the age of 59, Gosset left Dublin to take up the position of Head Brewer at a new (and second) Guinness brewery at Park Royal in northwestern London. In September 1937 Gosset was promoted to Head Brewer of all Guinness. He died one month later, aged 61, in Beaconsfield, England, of a heart attack.[1]
Gosset was a friend of both Pearson and Fisher, a noteworthy achievement, for each had a massive ego and a loathing for the other. He was a modest man who once cut short an admirer with this comment: "Fisher would have discovered it all anyway."[9]
See also
Bibliography
Gosset:
- "The application of the 'law of error' to the work of the Brewery" (1904, Guinness internal report)
- "On the error of counting with hæmacytometer". .
- "The probable error of a mean" (PDF). .
- "Probable error of a correlation coefficient". .
- "The distribution of the means of samples which are not drawn at random". .
- "An experimental determination of the probable error of Dr Spearman's correlation coefficients". .
- "Review of Statistical Methods for Research Workers (R. A. Fisher)". Eugenics Review. 18: 148–150. 1926.
- Zabell, S. L (March 2008). "On Student's 1908 Article "The Probable Error of a Mean" (S.L. Zabell)" (PDF). S2CID 48322195.
- "Evolution By Selection: The Implications of Winter's Selection Experiment", 1933, Eugenics Review, 24, pg293
- 'Student's' Collected Papers (edited by E.S. Pearson and John Wishart, with a foreword by Launce McMullen), London: Biometrika Office. (1942)
References
- ^ .
- ^ a b c "BIOGRAPHY 12.1 William S. Gosset (1876–1937)". Retrieved 11 January 2015. The site cites Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1972), pp. 476–477; International Encyclopedia of Statistics, vol. I (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 409–413.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-472-07007-7.
- ^ S2CID 127347145.
- JSTOR 2277631.
- PMID 27013722.
- S2CID 12175939.
- .
- ISBN 0-8050-7134-2.
Further reading
- Biographies
- ISBN 978-0-19-852227-0.
- Pearson, E. S. (1939). "'Student' as Statistician" (PDF). Biometrika. 30 (3/4): 210–250. .
- Beaven 1947, Barley: Fifty Years of Observation and Experiment
External links
- Biography by Heinz Kohler
- Student's T Distribution
- Earliest known uses of some of the words of mathematics: S under the heading of "Student's t-distribution", describes briefly how Student's z became t.
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "William Sealy Gosset", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews