Why Is Student's T-test Called Student?

Will O'Brien says the student t-test still carries the name Student because William Sealy Gossett published the small-sample method under that pseudonym so competitors would not learn Guinness had hired researchers to solve the problem.

Guinness was building an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. The team hired very smart people, told them to find a problem, and let the work run without a set direction. Lipids, or fats, in hops are among the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness. The brewery had to test hundreds of hops to judge whether a batch was high quality, and it was losing a few percent per batch. In the high-volume, low-margin food and beverage industry, a few percent is a lot of money. The calculation uses a sample of less than 30 and derives the standard deviation when the mean is known, or the mean when the standard deviation is known.

Gossett was doing the work with Fisher, another famous statistician, in the early 1920s, and he could not publish it under his own name. The paper went out under the name Student, in the journal O'Brien calls the first journal of Mathematica, so Anheuser-Busch, Heineken, and other brewers would not connect the research with Guinness. Keeping the work quiet protected better margins.