William Gosset was educated at Winchester, then entering New College Oxford where he studied chemistry and mathematics. While there he studied under Airy.
On graduating in 1899, he joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son. At Guinness, Gosset applied his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, trial and error and by spending two terms in 1906/7 in the biometric laboratory of Karl Pearson. Pearson helped Gosset with some of the mathematics in his research and publications. A set of papers in 1908 addressed the brewer's concern with small samples and laid out the framework for the t-test to handle the small samples from quality control experiments in brewing. At first, Pearson did not fully appreciate the importance of these methods for small samples since, as a biometrician, he typically had hundreds of observations to work with.
Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. This meant that Gosset was unable to publish his works under his own name. Therefore he used the pseudonym "Student" for his publications to avoid detection of his publications by his employer. Therefore his most famous achievement is now referred to as the Student t-distribution, which might otherwise have been the Gosset t-distribution.
Gosset discovered the form of the t distribution by a combination of mathematical and empirical work with random numbers, an early application of the Monte-Carlo method.
From 1922 he got a statistical assistant at the brewery, and he slowly built up a small statistics department which he ran until 1934.
Gosset certainly did not work in isolation. He corresponded with a large number of statisticians and he often visited his father in Watlington in England and on these occasions he would visit University College, London and the Rothamsted Agricultural Expe riment Station. He would discuss statistical problems with Fisher, Neyman and Pearson.
At the end of 1935 Gosset left Ireland to take charge of the new Guinness brewery in London. Despite the hard work involved in this venture he continued to publish statistics papers.