Students Collected Papers Edited Pearson (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. First Edition. Frontispiece, xiv, 224 pp. Original cloth. Very Good. Reprints 21 papers, three letters and three briefer contributions. 'In [1899] he joined Arthur Guinness and Sons, the brewers, in Dublin. Perceiving the need for more accurate statistical analysis of a variety of processes, from barley production to yeast fermentation, he urged the firm to seek mathematical advice. In 1906 he was therefore sent to work under Karl Pearson at University College, London. In the next few years Gossett (sic) made his most notable contributions to statistical theory, publishing under the pseudonym 'Student.' . . . All of Gossett's work was prompted by practical problems arising at the brewery. The most famous example is his 1908 paper, 'The Probable Error of a Mean [pp. 11-34 in Collected Papers].' He had to estimate the mean value of some characteristic in a population on the basis of very small samples. The theory for large samples had been worked out from the time of Gauss a century earlier, but when in practice large samples could not be obtained economically, there was no accurate theory of estimation. . . . What came to be called Student's t-test . . . In the theory of testing later advanced by Jerzy Neyman and Egon S. Pearson, Student's t-test is shown to be optimum. In the competing theory of fiducial probability advanced by R. A. Fisher, t is equally central. Gossett was perhaps lucky that he hit on the statistic which has proved basic for the statistical analysis of the normal distribution. His real insight lies in his observation that the sampling distribution of such statistics is fundamental for inference. In particular, it paved the way for the analysis of variance, which was to occupy such an important place in the next generation of statistical workers' (Ian Hacking in D.S.B. V: 476-7).

Gr.-8°. XVI,224 S. Orig.-Leinen mit Orig.-Umschlag. 3. Ausgabe.