This distribution was first described by the German statistician Friedrich Robert

Helmert in papers of 1875-6.where he computed the sampling distribution of the

sample variance of a normal population. Thus in German this was traditionally
known as the Helmertsche ("Helmertian") or "Helmert distribution".
The distribution was independently rediscovered by the English mathematician Karl
Pearson in the context of goodness of fit, for which he developed his Pearson's chisquared test, published in (Pearson 1900)

Friedrich
It was developed by Karl Pearson from a related idea introduced by Francis Galton in
the 1880s.

The t-statistic was introduced in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, a chemist working
for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland. The t-test is 107 years old. The t
statistic was introduced by William Sealy Gosset for cheaply monitoring the quality
of beer brews.

The name was coined by George W. Snedecor, in honour of Sir Ronald A. Fisher.
Fisher initially developed the statistic as the variance ratio in the 1920s. Ronald
Fisher coined the term "null hypothesis".