Student's t-distribution was introduced by William Sealy Gosset under the pseudonym student (hence the name) while working at Guinness Brewery. The family of t-tests highly relies on the student's t-distribution in order to infer; in fact, t-test is the general name given to any HT for which the test statistic is assumed to follow a t-distribution. Although normal distributions are very popular and common, a rigorous approach would rather trust a t-distribution instead of the normal one whenever the population's standard deviation is unknown and a sample's estimation is trusted instead.
The t-test also assumes that your sample comes from a normally distributed variable.
In case you may be wondering how these distributions ...
