Samuel Soal - Biography

Biography

Soal graduated with first class honours in mathematics from Queen Mary College (then East London College) in 1910. After service in World War I, in which he suffered shelling at the Battle of the Somme, he lectured in mathematics at Oxford in the Army School of Education, before returning as a lecturer to Queen Mary College, University of London. In 1944, he was awarded the D.Sc. from Queen Mary College, where he continued to lecture in mathematics until his retirement in 1954. In 1947, he presented the Ninth Myers Memorial Lecture to the Society for Psychical Research, largely on the topic of the card-guessing experiments he had been recently conducting. He served as president of the Society for the years 1950-1952. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1951, for which he journeyed to the USA to work with J. G. Pratt at Duke University. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship in Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London for the years 1954-1958. Thereafter, he moved permanently to Caernarvonshire, Wales, where he had routinely holidayed for each year over the past few decades, and where he died in 1975.