Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850 as he developed what he called "social physics". The modern term "body mass index" (BMI) for the ratio of human body weight to squared height was coined in a paper published in the July 1972 edition of the "Journal of Chronic Diseases" by Ancel Keys and others. In this paper, Keys argued that what he termed the BMI was "...if not fully satisfactory, at least as good as any other relative weight index as an indicator of relative obesity".