Friends: In case there was among your New Year 2015 wishes "to lose weight," and you think that the Body Mass Index (BMI) is a recent invention, you may be surprised that it was proposed already in 1835. In France by certain Mr. Quetelet, a distinguished scientist active in that by-gone era of fundamental discoveries in science and health care.
Working in public health he "derived a simple measure for classifying people's weight relative to an ideal weight for their height." His proposal, the body mass index <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index> (or Quetelet index), has endured to the present day and experienced a broad recognition with the health and diet craze of our generation. No wonder the French are thin. They have been at it for almost two centuries. Oh, the formula? Mass in kg divided by height in m, divided by the height again.
