Degrees of freedom (statistics)
The earliest and most basic concept of degrees of freedom was noted in the early 1800s, intertwined in the works of mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss. The modern usage and understanding of the term were expounded upon first by William Sealy Gosset, an English statistician, in his article "The Probable Error of a Mean," published in Biometrika in 1908 under a pen name to preserve his anonymity.1