Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet
(pronounced Ket-eh-lay) was born into a middle-class family on
February 22, 1796. He was a mathematician, astronomer,
statistician, poet, dramatist, and one of the founders of
sociology. Quetelet believed society could be analyzed without
bias using statistics. He described this new academic field as
social physics, believing it would reveal important patterns in
human society. In 1832, Quetelet discovered in his mountains of
data a relationship between height and weight in adults. “The
weights of individuals of different height are nearly like the
square of their height.” In 1972, the American physiologist
Ancel Keys formed the view that the Quetelet Index was the best
way to identify obese individuals and gave it a new name – the
body mass index.
In 1985, the U.S. National Institutes of Health adopted the body
mass index or BMI as a means of identifying underweight and
overweight individuals. He died age 77 on February 17, 1874.