Adolphe Quetelet

Adolphe Quetelet (1796 to 1874) was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and did much to bring statistical methods into the social sciences. Born in Ghent, he took a doctorate in mathematics in 1819 and persuaded officials and donors to fund the observatory, completed in 1828. He proposed a social physics, seeking the statistical laws behind crime, marriage and suicide rates, and set out the idea of the average man in his 1835 book Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultes. The proposal was controversial because it seemed to contradict free choice, and Auguste Comte coined the word sociology partly because he disagreed with Quetelet's use of the term social physics. Quetelet helped establish the cartographic and positivist schools of criminology, founded statistical societies and journals, chaired the first International Statistical Congress in 1853, and devised the body mass index, once called the Quetelet index. His work influenced Francis Galton and Florence Nightingale.