Quételet, Lambert Adolphe Jacques
Quételet, Lambert Adolphe Jacques (1796–1874)A Belgian statistician, author of On Man and the Development of Human Facilities, An Essay on Social Physics (1835), who applied the mathematics of probability to social phenomena and demonstrated the importance of statistics to social science. Quételet argued that, in the case of social phenomena, the distribution usually follows a normal curve—a conclusion reached by (among other things) observing the height of soldiers in a regiment. However, his work was for a long time ignored by social scientists, and it was not until the early 20th century that his writings were rediscovered.
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