Adolphe Quetelet | |
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| Born | Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-02-22)22 February 1796 |
| Died | 17 February 1874(1874-02-17) (aged 77) |
| Alma mater | University of Ghent |
| Known for | contributions tosocial physics |
| Awards | ForMemRS (1839)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | astronomer mathematician statistician sociologist |
| Institutions | Brussels Observatory |
Lambert Adolphe Jacques QueteletFRSF orFRSE (French:[kətlɛ]ⓘ; 22 February 1796 – 17 February 1874)[1] was aBelgian-Frenchastronomer,mathematician,statistician andsociologist who founded and directed theBrussels Observatory and was influential in introducing statistical methods to thesocial sciences. His name is sometimes spelled with an accent asQuételet.[2][3]
He also founded the science ofanthropometry and developed thebody mass index (BMI) scale, originally called the Quetelet Index.[4] His work on measuring human characteristic to determine the ideall'homme moyen ("the average man"), played a key role in the origins ofeugenics.[5][6][7]
Adolphe was born inGhent (which, at the time was a part of the newFrench Republic). He was the son of François-Augustin-Jacques-Henri Quetelet, a Frenchman and Anne Françoise Vandervelde, a Flemish woman. His father was born atHam,Picardy, and being of a somewhat adventurous spirit, he crossed the English Channel and became both a British citizen and the secretary of a Scottish nobleman. In that capacity, he traveled with his employer on the Continent, particularly spending time in Italy. At about 31, he settled in Ghent and was employed by the city, where Adolphe was born, the fifth of nine children, several of whom died in childhood.
Francois died when Adolphe was only seven years old. Adolphe studied at the Ghent Lycée, where he afterwards started teaching mathematics in 1815 at the age of 19. In 1819, he moved to the Athenaeum in Brussels and in the same year he completed hisdissertation (De quibusdam locis geometricis, necnon de curva focal – Of some new properties of the focal distance and some other curves).
Quetelet received a doctorate inmathematics in 1819 from theUniversity of Ghent. Shortly thereafter, the young man set out to convince government officials and private donors to build an astronomicalobservatory inBrussels; he succeeded in 1828.He became a member of theRoyal Academy in 1820. He lectured at the museum for sciences and letters and at the Belgian Military School. In 1825, he became a correspondent of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands, in 1827 he became a member. In 1839, he was elected as a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society.[8] From 1841 to 1851, he was a supernumerary associate in the institute, and when it becameRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences he became foreign member.[9] In 1850, he was elected a foreign member of theRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1825, he married Cécile-Virginie Curtet.[10]
Quetelet also founded several statistical journals and societies, and was especially interested in creating international cooperation among statisticians. He encouraged the creation of a statistical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), which later became theRoyal Statistical Society, of which he became the first overseas member. In 1853 he chaired both theInternational Maritime Conference and thefirst International Statistical Congress. He was a founding member of the firstSociété des douze.
In 1855, Quetelet developedapoplexy, which diminished but did not end his scientific activity.[citation needed]
He died inBrussels on 17 February 1874, and is buried in theBrussels Cemetery.
His scientific research encompassed a wide range of different scientific disciplines:meteorology, astronomy, mathematics, statistics,demography, sociology,criminology and history of science. He made significant contributions to scientific development, but he also wrote severalmonographs directed to the general public. He founded theRoyal Observatory of Belgium, founded or co-founded several national and international statistical societies and scientific journals, and presided over the first series of the International Statistical Congresses. Quetelet was aliberal and ananticlerical, but not anatheist ormaterialist nor asocialist.
Adolphe Quetelet discovered the optical phenomenonQuetelet rings.
The new science ofprobability andstatistics was mainly used in astronomy at the time, where it was essential to account for measurementerrors around means. This was done using the method ofleast squares. Quetelet was among the first to apply statistics to social science, planning what he called "social physics". He was keenly aware of the overwhelming complexity of social phenomena, and the many variables that needed measurement. His goal was to understand the statistical laws underlying such phenomena as crime rates, marriage rates orsuicide rates. He wanted to explain the values of these variables by other social factors. These ideas were rather controversial among other scientists at the time who held that it contradicted the concept of freedom of choice.
His most influential book wasSur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, published in 1835 (In English translation, it is titledTreatise on Man, but a literal translation would be "On Man and the Development of his Faculties, or Essay on Social Physics"). In it, he outlines the project of a social physics and describes his concept of the "average man" (l'homme moyen) who is characterized by themean values of measured variables that follow anormal distribution. He collected data about many such variables. Quetelet wrote about these values as "ideals" with deviations from them as being less than or more than ideal. He saw the average body as an ideal beauty and something to be desired and his work was influential onFrancis Galton who coined the termeugenics.[5][6][7]
Quetelet's studentPierre François Verhulst developed thelogistic function in the 1830s as a model ofpopulation growth; seeLogistic function § History for details.[11]
WhenAuguste Comte discovered that Quetelet had appropriated the term 'social physics', which Comte had originally introduced, Comte found it necessary to invent the term 'sociologie' (sociology) because he disagreed with Quetelet's notion that a theory of society could be derived from a collection of statistics.
Adolphe Quetelet also had a significant influence onFlorence Nightingale who shared with him a religious view of statistics which saw understanding statistics as revealing the work of God in addition to statistics being a force of good administration. Nightingale met Quetelet in person at the 1860 International Statistical Congress in London, and they corresponded for years afterwards.[12]
Quetelet was an influential figure incriminology. Along withAndre-Michel Guerry, he helped to establish thecartographic school andpositivist schools of criminology which made extensive use of statistical techniques. Through statistical analysis, Quetelet gained insight into the relationships betweencrime and other social factors. Among his findings were strong relationships between age and crime, as well asgender and crime. Other influential factors he found includedclimate,poverty,education, andalcohol consumption, with his research findings published inOf the Development of the Propensity to Crime.[13]
In his 1835 text on social physics, he presented his theory of humanvariance around theaverage, showing human traits were distributed according to anormal curve. The existence of such variation provided the basis for later writers, including Darwin, to argue that natural populations contained sufficient variability forartificial ornatural selection to operate.[14]
In terms of influence over laterpublic health agendas, one of Quetelet's lasting legacies was the establishment of a simple measure for classifying people's weight relative to an ideal for their height. His proposal, thebody mass index (or Quetelet index), has endured with minor variations to the present day.[15] Anthropometric data is used in modern applications and referenced in the development of every consumer-based product.
Quetelet was elected aForeign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1839.[1]
The asteroid1239 Queteleta is named after him. The title ofQuetelet professor atColumbia University is awarded in his name.
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