History – BMI Calculator

The formula was devised in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician, and was long known as the Quetelet Index. The name 'body mass index' was coined in 1972 by the American physiologist Ancel Keys.

The World Health Organization adopted BMI as its standard measure of overweight and obesity in the 1990s, and nearly two centuries after Quetelet it remains the most widely used screening tool in the world.