Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874) and French sociologist Auguste Comte are the first scientists that introduced the mechanistic approach to society to sociology. Comte divided sociology into social statics and social dynamics, while Quetelet used the term “social physics” as the title of his book.  In his book Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) Pitirim Sorokin divided the mechanistic approach into four branches: "the branch of social physics (Carey); of social mechanics (Barcelo, Haret, Lotka); the social energetics (E. Solvay, W Bechtereff, W Ostwald, T N Carver, L Winiarsky); and finally of mathematico-functional “pure sociology” (Pareto, Carli)" (Sorokin, 1928: 12-13).