Bizarre fact for the day

[gfish]

If you've ever heard of the Student's t-distribution, this is just crazy.

The derivation of the t-distribution was first published in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, while he worked at a Guinness Brewery in Dublin. He was prohibited from publishing under his own name, so the paper was written under the pseudonym Student. --Wikipedia

Weird enough, but then I realized -- under a slightly different corporate climate, this means we could have ended up with a Guiness distribution. Reality is messed up.

Comments

[adularia.livejournal.com]

It was a weird enough choice of pseudonym to make me look that up a couple years ago when I took stats - my textbook didn't mention the story. :(

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Yes, I knew that story. It's probably the funniest thing anybody ever hears in a statistics class. It's kind of awesome that he circumvented company policy to do that. Gutsy, even.