Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quetelet (Ghent 1796–Brussels 1874) has been aptly described as ‘the one-man band of nineteenth-century statistics’. This happy turn of phrase conveys the diversity of Quetelet's professional and intellectual activities throughout his life and it nicely fits with the image of him elaborated by his biographers. For instance, according to Belgian theologian Joseph Lottin, writing in 1912:

His American biographer, Frank H. Hankins, had already insisted in 1908 on the variety of Quetelet's pursuits, distinguishing between the mathematician, the astronomer and the statistician, as well as between the administrative, methodological and moral statistician. The prestige of Quetelet enduring well into the early twentieth century can further be illustrated by the fact that in 1914, Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who had just been elevated to the famous Padua chair in statistics, had entitled his inaugural lecture ‘L'uomo medio’, after Quetelet's well-known ‘average man’, to which French Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs had also devoted his complementary dissertation the year before.