Gosset, William Sealy

The t-statistic follows what is known as the Student s t-distribution, after the statistician William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937) who published under the pseudonym StudenT. The shape of the t-distribution is similar to that of the normal distribution, but forms a family of curves distinguished by a parameter known as the degrees of freedom. The 5% critical point in the t-distribution always exceeds the normal value of 1.96, but is nevertheless close to 2.0 for all but quite small values of degrees of freedom. 

The random f variable features a special distribution called as the t-Student, by William Sealy Gosset in 1908, and transforms as ... 

Pearson, E. S. (1990). Student, A Statistical Biography of William Sealy Gosset, Edited and Augmented by Plackett, R. L. with the Assistance of, G. Barnard, Oxford University Press. 

This simple standard error is rarely used now in practice, because there are more accurate ways of specifying one s knowledge of the uncertainty in the mean. This problem was first addressed by William Sealy Gosset in 1908 publishing under the pen name of Student . He derived the statistics describing the mean when estimating the mean from a set of data and derived the t-distribution function or the more commonly called Student s t distribution. This is listed in the previous section as the t distribution (see Section 8.3.4). Rather than the t distribution, a more commonly used function is the following At() function ... 

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