In memory of Thomas Greville

Dr. Thomas N. E. Greville passed away on February, 16, 1998, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although he had been suffering from Parkinson's disease, the immediate cause of death was pneumonia. He was 87 years old. He is survived by his wife, Florence, and two children, Alice and Edgar, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Born in New York City on December 27, 1910, Dr. Greville obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of the South, and his masters and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan, the latter in 1933. His field of study was mathematics, and he held various positions in academia and the U.S. government, culminating in a professorship in the Mathematics Research Center and School of Business at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 to 1981. He was a fellow in the Society of Actuaries and a member of the American Statistical Association, the Inter-American Statistical Association, the Society' of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Association.

Dr. Greville's contributions to parapsychology began in 1937, while he was an Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Michigan. From 1938 to 1944 he published three technical reports concerning the application of statistical methods to ESP card-guessing data. He was particularly interested in the "matching case," in which card sequences with fixed frequencies of each target alternative are matched against each other. He computed the exact probabilities for given numbers of correct matches, or hits, in this case. He also developed statistical formulas that could be applied to cases of this type, including the case of multiple responses to a single target sequence, the so-called "stacking effect" problem. His formulas provided the backbone of Burdick and Kelly's important chapter on statistical methodology in the Handbook of Parapsychology. Dr. Greville also participated in the famous ESP symposium at the 1938 meeting of the American Psychological Association, where he defended the validity and appropriateness of the statistical methods used by J. B. Rhine in evaluating ESP test data. Upon retiring in 1982, he once again exercised his interest in parapsychology by volunteering at Dr. Ian Stevenson's Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia Medical School.

Dr. Greville also expressed his interest in parapsychology through his membership in the Parapsychological Association and the Society for Scientific Exploration. It was at the conventions of these Societies that I had the pleasure of meeting him personally in the last years of his life. My strongest impression of him was that, despite his affliction with Parkinson's and difficulty with hearing, he always wore a glowing smile on his face. I regret not having the opportunity to know him better.

JOHN PALMER

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