Gosset was a pioneer of the statistical theory associated with small sample sizes. He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford U, where he studied chemistry. In 1899 he joined the staff of Arthur Guinness Son & Co. Ltd as a ‘brewer’. An early task was to investigate the relationship between the quality of the final product and that of the raw materials (such as barley and hops). The difficulty with this task was the expense and time involved in obtaining an observation, so large samples were not available. Gosset correctly mistrusted the existing theory and, in a paper published in 1908, entitled The Probable Error of a Mean, he conjectured the form of the t-distribution relevant for small samples. Guinness company policy at the time meant that Gosset was obliged to publish under a pseudonym: being naturally modest he chose the pen-name ‘Student’, and the t-distribution is still sometimes referred to as ‘Student's t-distribution’.

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/resources/poisson/gosset.html Fuller biography and photograph.