Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) was a French psychologist, best known for devising the first practical test of intelligence. Born in Nice and trained in law and medicine in Paris, he worked under Charcot at the Salpêtrière before becoming director of the laboratory of physiological psychology at the Sorbonne in 1894. With Théodore Simon he published in 1905 the scale for measuring children's mental development that, revised abroad, became the IQ test, though Binet himself warned against treating intelligence as a fixed quantity. He studied suggestibility, memory, chess players and his own daughters, founded the journal L'Année psychologique and wrote The Mind and the Brain on the relation of mind and matter.