QUETELET, THE FATHER OF STATISTICS

Abstract

By the 17th and 18th centuries, two trends in statistics had developed: descriptive statistics and political arithmetic. The main representatives of descriptive statistics were the newly established statistical offices or organisations in the countries. The main task of this movement was to describe the status of the state. Political arithmetic concentrated on the observation of socio-economic phenomena that could be quantified and on the relationships between social phenomena. Adolphe Quetelet, who played a major role in many disciplines, was most active in the field of statistics. He was the man who united the two branches of statistics and one of the people who made statistics a science. He is associated with the founding of many statistical journals and societies, and worked tirelessly to establish international cooperation between statisticians, resulting in the regular International Statistical Congresses. The aim of this article is to summarise Quetelet’s work and the history of the International Statistical Congresses, which contributed to the harmonisation of national statistics. Finally, we have examined Quetelet’s work in the field of crime statistics because Quetelet focused his attention not only on crime, but also on all the phenomena he believed determined the moral face of society. He also studied the evolution of suicide, divorce, out-of-wedlock births and prostitution. Quetelet recognised that it was possible to improve the state of human societies through appropriate state intervention, but that this required an understanding of the interplay of social processes. It can therefore be said that Quetelet made an outstanding contribution to many important areas of statistics and can rightly be called the father of statistics.