The Belgian statistician and astronomer Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quételet (1796-1874) is considered the founder of modern statistics and demography.

Adolphe Quételet was born in Ghent on Feb. 22, 1796. When he finished secondary school at the age of 17, he took a job teaching mathematics in a secondary school. A professor of mathematics at the newly established University of Ghent influenced Quételet to study mathematics. In 1819 he received his doctorate in mathematics with a dissertation in which he claimed to have discovered a new curve. The work was heralded as an important contribution to analytic geometry.

That year Quételet was appointed to the chair of elementary mathematics at the Athenaeum, and shortly thereafter he was elected to membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles-lettres of Brussels. He wrote numerous essays in mathematics and physics, founded and edited a journal, delivered lectures...