Talk:Adolphe Quetelet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ] (If you rated the article, please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
	This article is supported by the Science and academia work group.

An appropriate infobox may need to be added to this article, or the current infobox may need to be updated. Please refer to the list of biography infoboxes for further information.

It is requested that a picture or pictures of this person be included in this article to improve its quality.

[edit] 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)