Presentation Description. Remarkably, the theory for figuring out how much you can learn from just a few samples was invented to estimate the quality of the ingredients used in the production of Guiness beer. Volker Ziemann is a prize-winning physicist, an author, professor and perhaps most importantly tonight, a beer aficionado. He will be talking about how statistical process sampling originated in the early days of beer production – t distribution, gaussian curves, regression...etc. Importantly, it improved the quality of beer and led to efficient production practices.
Presenter Biography. Volker Ziemann obtained his PhD in accelerator physics from Dortmund University. He worked in Stanford at SLAC, in Geneva at CERN designing the Large Hadron Collider, and now at Jefferson Lab. Along the way he taught physics, supported the electron-cooler storage ring CELSIUS, and worked on accelerator projects at DESY and XFEL. Volker was awarded the Thureus prize from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. He is the author of several books including BEAMS: The Story of Particle Accelerators and the Science They Discover, which describes complex science in a way that is easy for non-physicists to understand. His other book, Physics and Finance, is a textbook and actually discusses technical aspects of today's topic.