It's almost St. Patrick's day -- when even non-beer-drinkers usually get into the spirit and hoist a Guinness, or at the very least don some Guinness memorabilia.



Let's take a nontraditional approach to honoring the brew that will be so popular tomorrow by looking at someone behind the scenes who helped create Guinness' high-quality and consistent signature brew, and who revolutionized the world of quantitative research: a statistician.

Beer and statistics? That's right ... Imagine my delight as I stumbled upon the great beer-statistics connection when doing some reading a few weeks ago for my Quantitative Analysis communication class, and in my reading I learned about the t-test, which, in the simplest of terms, allows a researcher to compare small sample means (mathematical averages) to learn more about a population as a whole.

The original t-test was developed by William Sealy Gosset, a biochemist who worked for Guinness in the early 20th century. At this time, the Guinness brewery was taking the progressive step of hiring statisticians, chemists and other scientists to improve the quality and consistency of their ingredients and their beer.

Gosset could only test small samples out of the entire quantity of beer brewed by Guinness while he worked there. He also tested samples of barley grown by the brewery. He came up with a statistical formula that would let him prove whether or not the very small samples reflected a much larger population (in this case, the 'population' would be all of the beer or barley used in Guinness' operations). Previously, statistical research had focused only on testing with large samples.

In addition, Gosset independently discovered another statistical distribution rule while observing the distribution of yeast cells during the brewing process.

Gosset's work founded the concept of quality control, which is used in all types of industries today, and his t distribution proved fundamental to the use of statistics in the 20th century. According to this biography of Gosset, "It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this achievement. It has proven fundamental to statistical inference as it exists today, not only in the realm of estimation, but also in hypothesis testing and the analysis of variance."

When Gosset published his work on the t-test in 1908 in the journal Biometrika, his writings had to be published under the pseudonym "Student," because Guinness did not want competitors to know their scientific trade secrets and forbade employees from publishing work under their own names. So, the t statistic is still known today as "Student's t-test."

The wonderfully-named Web site "Tales of Statisticians" includes another good quote about Gosset from a fellow statistician, Egon Pearson:

This St. Paddy's day, raise a glass to Mr. Gosset and give him the proper credit he deserves! We might not be celebrating with so many delicious glasses of Guinness in hand without all of his hard work and revolutionary ideas.