Student's t distribution

Meanings

1. A distribution that arises when the population standard deviation is unknown and has to be estimated from the data.

Etymology

From the pen-name of Irish statistician William Sealy Gosset, which he used for a 1908 paper in Biometrika, under the pseudonym Student. The distribution was popularised through the work of Ronald Fisher, who referred to it as Student's distribution and used the letter t to represent the test value.