Talk:Adolphe Quetelet

Excerpt from Statistics article
I am snipping this long discussion of Quetelet from Statistics; someone should consider integrating it into this page.


 * Furthermore, Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) was one important founder of statistics, introducing the notion of the "average man" (l'homme moyen), who constitutes a reality sui generis compared to real individuals (whom were the only reality, according to Ockham's nominalism, opposed to realism). The "average man" is characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution (which takes the form of a bell). Quetelet in fact brought together three different ways of thinking the unity of diversity: the nominalism vs realism controversy; 17th and 18th centuries engineers whom had calculated average, such as Vauban; and then the 18th century probabilists (Bernouilli's law of large numbers, the Gauss-Laplace synthesis which lead to the central limit theorem). Thus Adolphe Quetelet created a new language for new entities (the "average man") related to society and its stability, and not only to individuals and their rational choice, as did probabilists still do until Poisson and Laplace (by calculating the probability of one individual of choosing a determined action). Among the first who attempted to apply statistics to social science, planning what he called a "social physics", Adolphe Quetelet 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 or suicide 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 a concept of freedom of choice. He also created the body mass index, still in use for the measure of obesity.

Joshua Davis 15:35, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Biography re apoplexy
In the biography section the word apoplexy is used in reference to Quetelet's health issues in 1855, and while I have to confess I was unfamiliar with apoplexy after following the internal link it seems it is a word that is fairly ambiguous. I did a quick google search and came up with a few pages that stated Quetelet's episode in 1855 was a stroke. I'm fairly out of my depth here but it seems to me that the biography section may need altering to be more up-to-date and unambiguous? Apologies if there is indeed historical conjecture on the nature of this apoplexy and the sites I found were oversimplifying. --Marshmellis (talk) 10:39, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Useful article for further additions
After reading about Quetelet's influence on Florence Nightingale I wanted to add a mention about that, but the article I have cited https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4559562/ contains a lot more information about Quetelet which might be useful for further enhancements to this article. Wanted to point this out for future editors

Status of Ghent at Quetelet's birth.
This page indicates that Ghent was part of the French Republic at Quetelet's birth. If you go to the Ghent wiki page, it states, "In 1745, the city was captured by French forces during the War of the Austrian Succession before being returned to the Empire of Austria under the House of Habsburg following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748." According to that page, Ghent's status did not change until the Treaty of Ghent in 1815. Quetelet was born in 1796. So, does this not mean that Ghent was actually part of Austria at the time of Quetelet's birth? 2620:0:E50:1037:BD2E:D992:BDEF:AE7C (talk) 17:02, 24 January 2024 (UTC)