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 where is its argument. The use of in place of is commonplace in digital calculators today. "In place of we shall henceforth use the shorter symbol , made up of the initial letters of logarithm and of natural or Napierian." In 1881 he was in Schwartzbach, Saxony, when he submitted an article on finite groups found in the quaternion algebra.