Washington was born on December 10, 1847 in Yorkshire Center (later Delevan), New York, United States. He was the youngest of nine children of Henry and Eliza (Tomlinson) Stringham. He was a descendant in the fourth generation of Jacob Stringham, of Huguenot ancestry.
In 1865 he went to Topeka, Kansas, where he studied in the preparatory department of Lincoln (later Washburn) College, and between 1867 and 1873 spent three years in the college itself, interrupting his college course at intervals to work at sign-painting and bookkeeping. In 1873 he entered Harvard College, and in 1877, at the age of thirty, he graduated with the degree of A. B.
Upon his graduation from Harvard he was appointed to a fellowship in the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied for three years under James Joseph Sylvester, taking the degree of Ph. D. in 1880.
After the Johns Hopkins University he contributed to the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences his first piece of original work, "Investigations on Quaternions. "
While he was working at Johns Hopkins he also contributed to the American Journal of Mathematics, then almost the sole medium in the United States for mathematical papers of distinctly high quality, three important memoirs: "Some General Formul' for Integrals of Irrational Functions" (June 1879), "The Quaternion Formul' for Quantification of Curves, Surfaces, and Solids and for Barycentres" (September 1879), and "Regular Figures in n-dimensional Space" (March 1880).
After leaving Johns Hopkins he spent two years, 1880-82, at Leipzig, which Felix Klein was then making one of the mathematical foci of Europe, on the Parker fellowship of Harvard. He was thus among the early pupils of two men, Peirce and Klein, whose influence upon American mathematics was destined to be so marked in the quarter of a century which followed. Leaving Germany, he became professor of mathematics in the University of California (1882), where he remained until his death, and where he was active in setting a high standard of scholarship.
In 1893 there appeared his Uniplanar Algebra: Being Pt. 1 of a Propaedeutic to the Higher Mathematical Analysis, a part of which had already been published (1891) as a synopsis of a course of university extension lectures given in San Francisco during the winter of 1891-92. The work, however, was not well adapted to the classroom.
He died at Berkeley at the age of sixty-two years.
Washington Irving Stringham was a frequent contributor to the American Journal of Mathematics, the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the publications of various other learned bodies. He was vice-president of the American Mathematical Society and a member of its council. He revised the English algebra of Charles Smith, Elementary Algebra for the Use of Preparatory Schools (New York, 1894), but the work was too scholarly for general use in the United States at that time.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Excerpt from Uniplanar Algebra, Vol. 1: Being of a Propæd...)
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At Harvard he came under the influence of Benjamin Peirce and was initiated by him into the mysteries of the relatively new branch of quaternions.
Irving married Martha Sherman Day. The couple raised a daughter, Martha Sherman Stringham.
