Adolphe Quetelet

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (22 February 1796 – 17 February 1874) was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and was influential in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. His name is sometimes spelled with an accent as Quételet. He also founded the science of anthropometry and developed the body mass index (BMI) scale, originally called the Quetelet Index. His work on measuring human characteristic to determine the ideal l'homme moyen ("the average man") played a key role in the origins of eugenics.

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