Thread by @jlowin

Like beer?

Then you're going to LOVE statistics!

One of the most influential statisticians of all time was, secretly, the Head Brewer of Guinness.

(a lot of beer fans are nodding now)

He published under a pseudonym: "Student."

(a lot of statistics nerds are nodding now)

William Gosset joined Guinness in 1899 as its Head Experimental Brewer.

He immediately began one of the first data science programs.

Given limited resources, he was especially interested in ways of extracting confidence from small samples.

Gosset was largely self-taught, but was eventually accepted into the lab of renowned statistician Karl Pearson.

There, he began to publish the work that would make him famous.

Well, not him.

"Student."

Guinness did not want its competitors to find out that it was using cutting-edge data science, so it forbade publishing papers that mentioned "beer" or the author's name.

Therefore Gosset chose the name "Student," mostly because "autodidact" was considered obnoxious on Twitter.

Student's work, including his taught-in-stats-101 t-distribution, escaped notice at first. Eventually, its brilliance was acknowledged by Ronald Fisher, another giant of statistics.

They became friends, which is especially noteworthy because Pearson and Fisher HATED each other.

Gosset eventually became the Head Brewer of Guinness, capping one of the earliest data science success stories and forever cementing the importance of small data.