Irving Stringham

Washington Irving Stringham (December 10, 1847 – October 5, 1909) was an American mathematician born in Yorkshire, New York. He was the first person to denote the natural logarithm as ${\displaystyle \ln(x)}$ where ${\displaystyle x}$ is its argument. The use of ${\displaystyle \ln(x)}$ in place of ${\displaystyle \log _{e}(x)}$ is commonplace in digital calculators today.

"In place of ${\displaystyle ^{e}\log }$ we shall henceforth use the shorter symbol ${\displaystyle \ln }$, made up of the initial letters of logarithm and of natural or Napierian."^[1]

Irving Stringham
Born	(1847-12-10)December 10, 1847 Yorkshire, New York, U.S.
Died	October 5, 1909(1909-10-05) (aged 61) Berkeley, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard College Johns Hopkins University
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California at Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	James Joseph Sylvester

Stringham graduated from Harvard College in 1877. He earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1880. His dissertation was titled Regular Figures in N-dimensional Space^[2] under his advisor James Joseph Sylvester.

In 1881 he was in Schwartzbach, Saxony, when he submitted an article on finite groups found in the quaternion algebra.^[3]

Stringham began his professorship in mathematics at Berkeley in 1882.^[4] 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.^[5] In 1900 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Paris.^[6]

Personal life

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