Adolphe Quetelet

Adolphe Quetelet (22 February 1796 to 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. He founded the science of anthropometry and developed the body mass index, first called the Quetelet Index. His attempt to measure human characteristics in order to find the ideal average man, l'homme moyen, played a part in the origins of eugenics. Born in Ghent, then part of the French Republic, he was the fifth of nine children, and his father died when he was seven. He studied at the Ghent Lycée and began teaching mathematics there in 1815 at nineteen, then moved to the Athenaeum in Brussels in 1819, the year he completed his dissertation on geometric loci and the focal curve.