This article in the well-named "KalamaBrew" column of the Kalamazoo Gazette indicates that on this St. Patrick's Day eve we may want to pause to remember William Sealy Gosset, a chemist at Guinness who began his career a little more than a century ago. He created a couple of statistical theories, the Student's t-test as well as one on the distribution of yeast cells during the brewing process which have had a lasting effect on the field:

Gosset's work founded the concept of quality control, which is used in all types of industries today, and his t distribution proved fundamental to the use of statistics in the 20th century. According to this biography of Gosset, "It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this achievement. It has proven fundamental to statistical inference as it exists today, not only in the realm of estimation, but also in hypothesis testing and the analysis of variance."

We forget sometimes that the history of science up to a certain point in the Victorian era was the history of brewing science. If you want any number of clear lesson in that regard I can't recommend a book better than A History of Beer and Brewing by Ian Hornsey, published by the Royal Society of Chemists. Yet I had not considered the reach of brewing science into the realm of applied mathematics. That was perhaps because I assume that math is the realm of the egghead and not the person with some dirt under the fingernails. Oxford-educated Gosset's application of his statistical model, however, had both agricultural and ultimately business goals as the secret gnomes of Wikipedia have noted: "Gosset's interest in barley cultivation led him to speculate that design of experiments should aim, not only at improving the average yield, but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive (robust) to variation in soil and climate."

On the one hand we can see Gosset's work as a stage in the creation of the macro-industrial brewer and the destruction of any sense of terrior yet on the other an example of how brewing was a leading industry in the realm of scientific research and development. So, on Tuesday maybe hoist a Guinness (or a superior if less standard stout), then, at your leisure if you will to Mr. Gosset who was also apparently quite a lovely lad.