Adolphe Quetelet was his name. Chances are you don’t know him. Nevertheless, one of Eurostat’s large meeting rooms in Luxembourg was named after him, and he was given his own street in his home town of Ghent.
Quetelet was a mathematician. He was fond of measuring. He measured everything that got in his way. Among other things, he studied the chest sizes of thousands of Scottish soldiers. Furthermore, in the Quetelet-Dondelin theorem, he established the relationship between the different types of conic sections and the position of the plane and the opening angle of the cone with which they are constructed. Let us not talk about that.
Quetelet found that all the chests of all the Scottish soldiers were different. That there were chicken breasts, and pudgy breasts, and massive torsos. He mapped the entire range of Scottish chests. As the budget of the Scottish army was not yet exhausted, he then measured the height of as many soldiers as possible. And although some of them began to grumble that it was enough, so did their weight.
Does this research seem trivial to you? It may have done more than you would have expected. All these measurements inspired Quetelet to develop the Quetelet index, better known as the body mass index or BMI.
Quetelet hung quite a few conclusions on his research. The most important was that the average person does not exist. It turned out to be 1.625498 m tall, weigh 61.594856 kg and have 2.32658 children. And indeed. You can search until you are blue in the face: You will not find such a person.
Nevertheless, almost all mattresses are still made for the average person. Except for the YUNO mattress. It is as unique as you are. So thanks to Adolphe Quetelet, who by measuring the chests of Scottish soldiers came to an insight that also became an important source of inspiration for YUNO.
