Azizul Haque

Khan Bahadur Qazi Azizul Haque was a Bengali police officer and inventor in British India who, together with Edward Henry and Hem Chandra Bose, developed the Henry Classification System for fingerprints in Calcutta during the 1890s. Haque's specific contribution was mathematical: he devised the formula that converted the ridge patterns on a set of ten fingerprints into a compact numerical classification, allowing a large fingerprint archive to be searched and a matching record retrieved efficiently, which was the practical breakthrough that made fingerprint identification usable at the scale of a national police record system. Adopted by British India in 1897 and subsequently by police forces across the British Empire including Scotland Yard, the Henry Classification System remained the standard method of manual fingerprint classification for most of the twentieth century.