Measures of center.

Mathematician Measurement Mode, median, and various averages and anthropometry pioneer Adolphe Quetelet is sometimes called the “father of the average man.” His nineteenth-century work A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties outlined theories regarding distributions of human traits. Whereas others before him had applied the normal distribution to describe measurement errors, Quetelet asserted that human traits, both physical and intellectual, were normally distributed around some central value. In his later work, the “average man” was sometimes presented as an ideal human, a concept that mathematicians, such as Antoine Cournot, disputed. Nonetheless, notions of a central value representing a typical case within a set of observations became very influential in research and statistical data analysis. There are many ways to think about center or typical values.