Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, was born at Nice. The son of a doctor and an artist, Binet studied at the Sorbonne, qualifying in 1878 in both law and science. He embarked immediately on a doctorate under Edouard Balbiani, embryologist and professor at the Collège de France, whose daughter Binet married in 1884. In the same year he submitted an article on the fusion of images to La revue philosophique. The editor, Théodule Ribot, persuaded him in due course to devote his energies to psychology. Through Charles Féré, Binet came to work with Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital.

Binet is known mainly for his work, with his younger colleague Théodore Simon, in devising tests for assessing children's intelligence. The Binet-Simon scale, published in 1905 and revised in 1908 and 1911, constituted the first systematic, effective, and widely accepted attempt to devise sets...