Peter Jephson Cameron

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

(born 23 January 1947) is an Australian mathematician who works in

group theory In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

, coding theory, and

model theory In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between formal theories (a collection of sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a mathematical structure), and their models (those structures in which the s ...

. He is currently half-time Professor of Mathematics at the

University of St Andrews (Aien aristeuein) , motto_lang = grc , mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best , established = , type = Public research university Ancient university , endowment ...

, and Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary University of London. Cameron received a B.Sc. from the

University of Queensland , mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work , established = , endowment = A$224.3 million , budget = A$2.1 billion , type = Public research university , chancellor = Peter Varghese , vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry , city = B ...

and a D.Phil. in 1971 from the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

as a

Rhodes Scholar The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Established in 1902, it is the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the world' ...

, with

Peter M. Neumann Peter Michael Neumann OBE (28 December 1940 – 18 December 2020) was a British mathematician. His fields of interest included the history of mathematics and Galois theory. Biography Born in December 1940, Neumann was a son of the German-bo ...

as his supervisor. Subsequently, he was a Junior Research Fellow and later a Tutorial Fellow at

Merton College Merton College (in full: The House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, ch ...

, Oxford, and also lecturer at Bedford College, London.

Work

Cameron specialises in

algebra Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary a ...

and combinatorics; he has written books about combinatorics, algebra,

permutation groups In mathematics, a permutation group is a group ''G'' whose elements are permutations of a given set ''M'' and whose group operation is the composition of permutations in ''G'' (which are thought of as bijective functions from the set ''M'' to ...

, and logic, and has produced over 350 academic papers. In 1988, he posed the

Cameron–Erdős conjecture In combinatorics, the Cameron–Erdős conjecture (now a theorem) is the statement that the number of sum-free sets contained in = \ is O\big(\big). The sum of two odd numbers is even, so a set of odd numbers is always sum-free. There are \lceil ...

with

Paul Erdős Paul Erdős ( hu, Erdős Pál ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in ...

Honours and awards

He was awarded the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

Whitehead Prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whiteh ...

in 1979 and is joint winner of the 2003

Euler Medal The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) is an international scientific organization formed in 1990 to increase the visibility and influence of the combinatorial community. In pursuit of this goal, the ICA sponsors conferences, ...

. In 2008, he was selected as the Forder Lecturer of the LMS and New Zealand Mathematical Society. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

Books

* * * * * * * *

Notes

References

Short biography

External links

Home page
at Queen Mary University of London
Home page
at University of St Andrews
Peter Cameron's 60th birthday conferencePeter Cameron's blog
* Academics of Queen Mary University of London Academics of the University of St Andrews 1947 births Living people Australian Rhodes Scholars Algebraists Coding theorists Combinatorialists Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford University of Queensland alumni Whitehead Prize winners Model theorists 20th-century Australian mathematicians 21st-century Australian mathematicians Group theorists {{Mathematician-stub