Adolphe Quetelet
Questelet started out studying conic sections and founded the Belgian Royal Observatory in 1819. In 1824 he travelled to Paris to study astronomy. While in Paris, he not only studied astronomy but also learned about the emerging science of probability from Fourier and Laplace.
While continuing in his post at the Observatory, where he focused on improving observations of meteorological data in particular, Quetelet began to also study probability as it applied to social problems. Following the lead of Laplace and Fourier, he thought of the normal function as a curve rather than just an error function. He sought to use this new mathematical tool to describe "normal" behavior. His studies on the numerical consistencies of crimes let to great controversy among social scientists of the day, generating debates on determinism versus free will.
In 1835 Quetelet published Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultés, essai d'une physique sociale n which he championed this new science that he called "social mechanics" hoping to map the social and moral characteristics of humans. He thought of these "average" values of moral and intellectual measures as being more than abstractions but rather as describing real dimesions of a population. In his later works he seemed to suggest that nature sought to resolve about these average values and deviations from the norm were errors. Another unfortunate aspect of Quetelet's otherwise groundbreaking work was the manner in which it seemed to reinforce the racial stereotypes so common in nineteenth century thought (or even today).
The "Quetelet Index" is an internationally used measure of obesity.
Quetelet organized the first statistical conference, was the first foriegn member of the American Statistical Association and was instrumental in forming the International Statistical Congress. He was described as the "patriarch of statistics" by the historian George Sarton. Belgium issued the following stamp in the centennial of his death.
The premiere site for biographies of mathematicians on the web is at The University of Saint Andrews in Scotland; this is the primary source of the information in these short biographies. Some biographies used additional web resources as noted in the biography.
The postage stamp images came from a wonderful site on mathematicians on stamps maintained by Jeff Miller, a mathematics teacher in Florida.
The Free Internet Encyclopedia Wikipedia is also an excellent source of information and was used as a reference for many bographies.
The opinions expressed in these biographies are those of the author and do not reflect official views of the University of Oklahoma.
