Thomas N.E. Greville
Encyclopedia
Thomas Nall Eden Greville was an American mathematician
, specializing in statistical analysis, particularly as it concerned the experimental investigation of psi
.
in 1933. His Ph.D. thesis concerned Invariance of the Property of Admissiblitiy Under Certain General Types of Transformations. Thereafter Greville worked as actuarial assistant in the company Acacia Mutual Life Insurance (1933-37); instructor in mathematics at the University of Michigan (1937-40); actuarial mathematician in the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1940-46); chief of the Actuarial Analysis section of the National Office of Vital Statistics (1946-52); statistical consultant to the U.S. Operations Mission to Brazil (1952-54); assistant chief actuary, U.S. Social Security Administration (1954-58); chief mathematician in the Office of the Quartermaster General (1958-61); vice-president of the S.A. Millar Company, Washington, D.C. (1961-62); and visiting professor within the Mathematics Research Center of the U.S. Army in 1962. From 1963 to 1985, he worked as a mathematics Professor at the Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
.
Greville was a member of the American Mathematical Society; the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; the Society of Actuaries; the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; the American Statistical Association; and the Parapsychological Association. He served as editor of the Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and as statistical editor for the Journal of Parapsychology
.
He lived in Charlottesville, VA
, US.
.
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
, specializing in statistical analysis, particularly as it concerned the experimental investigation of psi
Psi (parapsychology)
Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".-Etymology:...
.
Biography/Career
Greville was born in New York on December 27, 1910, and died in 1998. Following receipt of a B.A. degree from the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee) in 1930, and a M.A. degree in 1932, he received a Ph.D. from the University of MichiganUniversity of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
in 1933. His Ph.D. thesis concerned Invariance of the Property of Admissiblitiy Under Certain General Types of Transformations. Thereafter Greville worked as actuarial assistant in the company Acacia Mutual Life Insurance (1933-37); instructor in mathematics at the University of Michigan (1937-40); actuarial mathematician in the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1940-46); chief of the Actuarial Analysis section of the National Office of Vital Statistics (1946-52); statistical consultant to the U.S. Operations Mission to Brazil (1952-54); assistant chief actuary, U.S. Social Security Administration (1954-58); chief mathematician in the Office of the Quartermaster General (1958-61); vice-president of the S.A. Millar Company, Washington, D.C. (1961-62); and visiting professor within the Mathematics Research Center of the U.S. Army in 1962. From 1963 to 1985, he worked as a mathematics Professor at the Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
.
Greville was a member of the American Mathematical Society; the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; the Society of Actuaries; the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; the American Statistical Association; and the Parapsychological Association. He served as editor of the Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and as statistical editor for the Journal of Parapsychology
Journal of Parapsychology
The Journal of Parapsychology is a semi-annual peer-reviewed publication "devoted primarily to the original publication of experimental results and other research findings in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis." It also contains reviews of "literature relevant to parapsychology, criticisms...
.
He lived in Charlottesville, VA
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, US.
Contributions
Greville is mainly credited with providing a general method for analyzing data from forced-choice matching experiments, in a way that is sensitive to different ways of sampling the alternatives that are matched, how likely it is that each alternative will be sampled (which can be unequal), and the number of responses that are matched to the target set. His method – known as the Greville method – essentially provides a mathematically consistent means of obtaining the expected mean and variance of matching two or more samples of a limited set of alternatives, under any of the possible combinations of these conditions. He proposed his method particularly in the context of the 1930s controversy on the proper analysis of tests in extrasensory perception, and, accordingly, his method has been often, if not mostly, applied within the field of parapsychologyParapsychology
The term parapsychology was coined in or around 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir, and originates from para meaning "alongside", and psychology. The term was adopted by J.B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research...
.
Key publications
- Greville, T. N. E. (1938). Exact probabilities for the matching hypothesis. Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 55-59.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1938). ESP and mathematics. [Paper presented at the APA symposium on "Methods in ESP Research," Columbus, Ohio, September 9, 1938]. Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 248-252.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1941). The frequency distribution of a general matching problem. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 12, 350-354.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1943). Frequency of distributions of ESP scores for certain call patterns. Journal of Parapsychology, 7, 272-276.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1944). On multiple matching with one variable deck. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 15, 432-434.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1949). On the number of sets required for testing the significance of verbal material. Journal of Parapsychology, 13, 137-138.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1951). A method of evaluating the reinforcement effect. Journal of Parapsychology, 15, 118-121.
- Greville, T. N. E. (1954). A reappraisal of the mathematical evaluation of the reinforcement effect. Journal of Parapsychology, 18, 178-183.
- Greville, T. N. (1980). Are psi events random? Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 74, 223-226.
Works about
- Adi Ben-Israel, Thomas N.E. Greville: Generalized Inverses. ISBN 0-387-00293-6, Springer-VerlagSpringer Science+Business Media- Selected publications :* Encyclopaedia of Mathematics* Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete * Graduate Texts in Mathematics * Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique...
(2003) - D. S. Meek, R. G. Stanton (Editors): Selected papers of T. N. E. Greville. Charles Babbage Research Centrehttp://www.cbi.umn.edu/, WinnipegWinnipegWinnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
, CanadaCanadaCanada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
(1984)
External links
- The Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State UniversityNorth Dakota State UniversityNorth Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Sciences, more commonly known as North Dakota State University , is a public university in Fargo, North Dakota. NDSU has about 14,000 students and it is the largest university in North Dakota based on full time students and land size...
- November 1998 Accessions of UW–Madison Archives