Robert W. Stringall
Professor emeritus, mathematics

Robert W. Stringall, a professor emeritus of mathematics and a civil rights advocate who believed math held the power to change the lives of disadvantaged children, died Dec. 27 in Davis of complications related to Lewy body disease. He was 78.

Stringall promoted the teaching of advanced mathematics in elementary schools and spearheaded the establishment of a UC Davis graduate program to train math teachers. A popular instructor, he also worked to increase minority student enrollment at UC campuses, visiting primarily black colleges in segregated Birhingham, Ala., and enduring threats of visits from the Klu Klux Klan.

Stringall joined the mathematics faculty in the fall of 1965, after completing his master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. (His dissertation was titled “Endomorphism Rings of P-Primary Abelian Groups.”)

Soon after his arrival at UC Davis, Stringall learned of efforts to determine why so few African American students were enrolled at UC campuses. UC Berkeley statistics professor Ed Barankin had obtained a Field Foundation grant and was seeking a researcher to go to Birmingham. “No one answered the flier but me,” Stringall recalled in an oral history interview conducted by his daughter Cheryl in 2000.

As a bearded, white man visiting black colleges and talking publicly with African Americans, Stringall encountered deep hostility from whites in 1960s Birmingham, where city blocks were still zoned by skin color. He said he was chased through his motel, his briefcase was broken into, and his landlady told him to expect a “meeting” with her son-in-law and his fellow Klan members.

In the end, he said, he found just one student of color there who met UC admission requirements. Stringall decided to focus his efforts closer to home, launching a Project SEED program to teach college-level math to children in schools in Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood. Project SEED (Special Elementary Education for the Disadvantaged) was a nationwide, federally funded program, started a few years earlier at Berkeley High School, that used Socratic question-and-answer methods to teach math.

Stringall went on to establish similar programs in other schools, ultimately eschewing uncertain federal funding and creating internships for UC Davis math students to teach advanced algebra and geometry to schoolchildren.

“A typical day would be going to a totally disrupted classroom where the teacher had a gun in his desk and kids with dirty clothes and different-colored socks, if they had socks at all,” Stringall said in 2000. “They just didn’t care. So to use mathematics was important. Because there was so much esteem associated with mathematics in school, the children changed.”

Their success in solving advanced math problems, he said, gave them confidence to do better in other subjects as well, improving their odds for graduating from high school and going on to college.

To raise the caliber of math teachers, Stringall helped develop the Masters of Arts in Teaching Program, which graduated about 250 students from its start in 1975-76 until the program was suspended about 2006.

“Bob had the reputation of being an innovative thinker in his approach to the preparation of mathematics teachers,” said Jim Diederich, a mathematics professor emeritus who worked with Stringall in launching the graduate program. “He was well respected by his students, and I believe many of them went on to influence others in their teaching.”

Among them was George Drake, a retired Lake Tahoe Community College math professor. As a UC Davis mathematics doctoral candidate, Drake helped Stringall run the Master of Arts in Teaching Program in the 1970s, and the two became lasting friends.

Drake called his former mentor “an example of integrity and moral rectitude” and “one of the smartest men I’ve ever known.”

“To this day, I can instantly tell a motorcyclist who understands how to control his motorbike by turning the handlebars in the opposite direction of the desired path,” Drake said. “He taught me that, and he could explain it down to the erg.”

Elaine Kasimatis, a professor of mathematics and statistics at California State University, Sacramento, who earned her bachelor’s, master's and doctoral degrees at UC Davis, said Stringall deeply influenced her philosophy and style of teaching.

She said she found him “thought-provoking and inspiring” though sometimes enigmatic. “Fellow M.A.T. students and I in ’76-'78 warmly referred to him as ‘Bobbi Wan,’ as in Obi Wan Kenobi, the Jedi master from the first Stars Wars film,” Kasimatis said.

Among the courses he taught were algebra, set theory, theory of groups, teaching of mathematics, mathematics pedagogy and curriculum development in mathematics.

Stringall retired from UC Davis in 1989. “He never stopped being a proponent of equal rights and befriending those less advantaged than himself (no matter what race or nationality) up until the end,” said daughter Cheryl “String” Stringrall, an artist and marketing consultant who lives in Dorset, England.

Robert Stringall was born Dec. 12, 1933, in San Francisco. His father had dropped out of school in seventh grade but became a mechanic, telephone lineman, self-taught printer and musician who invented a number of electrical devices, Cheryl Stringall said.

Robert Stringall’s mother, a homemaker with know-how in chemistry and nutrition, was the daughter of a Harvard-educated physician who ran a pharmacy in Guerneville.

An Air Force veteran, Stringall was married for 16 years to Charlotte Farley and later to Donna Tobin. In addition to daughter Cheryl, his survivors include daughter Pam of Davis; three grandchildren; two sisters and a brother; and numerous nieces and nephews.

No immediate service is planned but a remembrance gathering will be held in Davis this spring. For details, contact Cheryl Stringall by e-mail, boracque@hotmail.com.

— Kathleen Holder

Richard ‘Dick’ Rice
Entomologist emeritus

A celebration of Dick Rice's life is set for Saturday, Feb. 11, in Selma (Fresno County).

Richard “Dick” Rice, a UC Davis alumnus who worked at UC’s Kearney Agricultural and Extension Center for 33 years, died Dec. 24 of cancer. He was 74.

He retired in 2001, receiving emeritus status with UC Davis, and remained active as a consultant to several agricultural industry commissions.

He received three degrees at UC Davis: a bachelor’s in 1960, a master’s in 1961 and a doctorate in insect ecology and agricultural entomology in 1967.

The celebration of life is scheduled to begin at 2:30 p.m. at the Spike 'n' Rail Steakhouse, 2950 Pea Soup Anderson Blvd. (at the junction of highways 43 and 99). People planning to attend are asked to arrange RSVPs by e-mail, golfers2@comcast.net.

Read the complete obituary.

— Dateline staff