Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet
The astronomer who pointed the normal curve at human beings instead of measurement error, invented the 'average man,' and left his fingerprints on a bathroom scale formula still used two centuries later
Adolphe Quetelet took the normal curve that Gauss and Laplace had built to describe measurement error and pointed it at human populations instead, founding what he called 'social physics' and introducing the concept of the average man. This bio covers his founding of the Royal Observatory of Brussels, his statistical study of crime that reignited the free-will-versus-determinism debate, his organizing of the first International Statistical Congress, his correspondence with Florence Nightingale, and the Quetelet Index -- a population-level statistical tool that outlived its original purpose to become the modern Body Mass Index.