distribution was first described by the German statistician Friedrich Robert Helmert (1843-1917) in papers of 1875–6,where he computed the sampling distribution of the sample variance of a normal population.
In German this was traditionally known as the Helmert'sche ("Helmertian") or "Helmert distribution".
The distribution was independently rediscovered by the English mathematician Karl Pearson (1857-1936) in the context of goodness of fit, for which he developed his Pearson's chi-square test, published in 1900, with computed table of values published.
The name "chi-square" ultimately derives from Pearson's shorthand for the exponent in a multivariate normal distribution with the Greek letter Chi.
The idea of a family of "chi-square distributions", however, is not due to Pearson but arose as a further development due to Fisher in the 1920s.
In statistics, the t-distribution was first derived as a posterior distribution in 1876 by Helmert and Lüroth. The t-distribution also appeared in a more general form as Pearson Type IV distribution in Karl Pearson's 1895 paper.
In the English-language literature the distribution takes its name from William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937)'s 1908 paper in Biometrika under the pseudonym "Student".
Gosset's paper refers to the distribution as the "frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population".
It became well known through the work of Ronald Fisher, who called the distribution "Student's distribution" and represented the test value with the letter t.
The F-distribution, also known as Snedecor's F distribution or the Fisher–Snedecor distribution (after Ronald Fisher(1890-1962) and George W. Snedecor(1881-1974))
arises frequently as the null distribution of a test statistic, most notably in the analysis of variance (ANOVA), e.g., F-test.