Guinness a statistika

Při hodinách statistiky mě už několikrát napadlo, proč se tabulka pro t-test jmenuje Student's t-test, a jaké bylo mé překvapení, když jsem se na Wiki dočetl, že za to může Guinness. Jde totiž o metodu vynalezenou pro lacinější kontrolu kvality ječmene pro vaření Guinnesse. Tak nejenom že jsem v Irsku žil v Celbridge, kde se Arthur Guinness narodil, a chodil do hospody, kde zamlada pracoval, ale teď mi zkřížil cestu znova. To budu asi muset zapít něčím černým^^

Z Wiki:

The t statistic was introduced by William Sealy Gosset for cheaply monitoring the quality of beer brews ("Student" was his pen name)^[1]. Gosset was a statistician for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was 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. Gosset published the t 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 unknown not only to fellow statisticians but to his employer — the company insisted on the pseudonym so that it could turn a blind eye to the breach of its rules.

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.