Washington Irving Stringham (December 10, 1847 – October 5, 1909) was an American mathematician born in

Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ) is an area of Northern England which was History of Yorkshire, historically a county. Despite no longer being used for administration, Yorkshire retains a strong regional identity. The county was named after its county town, the ...

, New York. He was the first person to denote the

natural logarithm The natural logarithm of a number is its logarithm to the base of a logarithm, base of the e (mathematical constant), mathematical constant , which is an Irrational number, irrational and Transcendental number, transcendental number approxima ...

\ln(x)

where

x

is its argument. The use of

\ln(x)

in place of

\log_e(x)

is commonplace in digital calculators today.

"In place of $^\log$ we shall henceforth use the shorter symbol $\ln$ , made up of the initial letters of ''logarithm'' and of ''natural'' or ''Napierian''."

Stringham graduated from

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...

in 1877. He earned his PhD from

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

in 1880. His dissertation was titled ''Regular Figures in N-dimensional Space'' under his advisor

James Joseph Sylvester James Joseph Sylvester (3 September 1814 – 15 March 1897) was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership ...

. In 1881 he was in Schwartzbach,

Saxony Saxony, officially the Free State of Saxony, is a landlocked state of Germany, bordering the states of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Bavaria, as well as the countries of Poland and the Czech Republic. Its capital is Dresden, and ...

, when he submitted an article on

finite group In abstract algebra, a finite group is a group whose underlying set is finite. Finite groups often arise when considering symmetry of mathematical or physical objects, when those objects admit just a finite number of structure-preserving tra ...

s found in the

quaternion In mathematics, the quaternion number system extends the complex numbers. Quaternions were first described by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. The algebra of quater ...

algebra. Stringham began his professorship in mathematics at Berkeley in 1882. In 1893 in Chicago, his paper ''Formulary for an Introduction to Elliptic Functions'' was read at the International Mathematical Congress held in connection with the

World's Columbian Exposition The World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was a world's fair held in Chicago from May 5 to October 31, 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. The ...

. In 1900 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Paris.

Personal life

Irving married Martha Sherman Day. The couple raised a daughter, Martha Sherman Stringham, (March 5, 1891- August 7, 1967).

References

Publications

* I. Stringham (1879
The Quaternion Formulae for Quantification of Curves, Surfaces, and Solids, and for Barycenters

American Journal of Mathematics The ''American Journal of Mathematics'' is a bimonthly mathematics journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. History The ''American Journal of Mathematics'' is the oldest continuously published mathematical journal in the United S ...

2:205–7. * I. Stringham (1901
On the geometry of planes in a parabolic space of four dimensions

Transactions of the American Mathematical Society The ''Transactions of the American Mathematical Society'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of pure and applied mathematics published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in 1900. As a requirement, all articles must ...

2:183–214. * I. Stringham (1905) "A geometric construction for quaternion products",

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society The ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'' is a quarterly mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. Scope It publishes surveys on contemporary research topics, written at a level accessible to non-experts. ...

11(8):437–9.

External links

*
Portrait of W. Irving Stringham
from Mathematics Department

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

San Francisco Call 6 October 1909
re Irving Stringham death, from California Digital Newspaper Collection. {{DEFAULTSORT:Stringham, Irving 1847 births 1909 deaths 19th-century American mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians Harvard College alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni People from Cattaraugus County, New York Mathematicians from New York (state)