It was developed in the 1830s by a Belgian sociologist, astronomer, and statistician, Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. Quetelet, in the search for l’homme moyen—an idealized average man—took the measurements of different populations over time, searching for some universal average. For Quetelet, “this average man was hardly the ‘average’ (read ‘mediocre’) that is our present connotation.
