Researching Robert Cameron

Cameron was the son of M. W. Cameron, of Indianapolis, Indiana. He completed an undergraduate degree at Purdue University and a graduate degree in astronomy at Indiana University.

On April 20, 1950, he discovered the minor planet (1575) Winifred at Brooklyn, Indiana. He named the body for Winifred Sawtell, who became his wife and colleague Winifred Cameron. He edited The Magnetic and Related Stars, a collection of papers presented at a 1965 symposium in Greenbelt, Maryland. The lunar crater Cameron was named after him, by his wife.

Cameron was born in the Hunter Region coal mining town of Minmi. He was the son of a coal-miner and was educated to elementary level at Plattsburg public school. His initial employment was as a coal miner at the Wallsend Colliery at the age of 14. He was an office-holder in the Miners' Federation prior to his election to parliament.

Following the abolition of multi-member seats elected by proportional representation at the 1927 election, Cameron won ALP pre-selection and the general election for the seat of Wallsend. This seat was abolished in a redistribution before the 1930 state election and Cameron was subsequently elected to the seat of Waratah. He remained the representative for this seat until his retirement in 1956.

On 1 January 1963, Cameron was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire "in recognition of public service in New South Wales."

Cameron received his Ph.D. in 1932 from Cornell University under the direction of W. A. Hurwitz. He studied under a National Research Council postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1933 to 1935. Cameron was a faculty member at MIT from 1935 to 1945. He was then a faculty member at the University of Minnesota until his retirement. He spent the academic year 1953–1954 on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study. His doctoral students include Monroe D. Donsker. He had a total of 35 Ph.D. students at the University of Minnesota — his first two graduated in 1946 and his last one in 1977. Cameron published a total of 72 papers — his first in 1934 and his last, posthumously, in 1990.

At MIT, he did some work with Norbert Wiener. During the 1940s Cameron and W. T. Martin, who was from 1943 to 1946 the chair of the mathematics department at Syracuse University, engaged in an ambitious program of extending Norbert Wiener's early work on mathematical models of Brownian motion. In 1944, Cameron was awarded the Chauvenet Prize for '"Some Introductory Exercises in the Manipulation of Fourier Transforms", which appeared in National Mathematics Magazine, 1941, vol. 15, pages 331–356.