Adolphe Quetelet

Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, applied the statistics of measurement error to people in the 1830s, describing crime rates, heights and chest sizes of soldiers through averages and distributions. His idea of the "average man" shaped early social science, though it was criticised as reducing people to means. His formula for weight relative to height, later named the body mass index, is still used in health screening.