A teacher to the core, in love with math, pushing limits

Dwayne Cameron of Middleborough was the type of person who just couldn't stop making mathematical connections, even on a family vacation. "We were driving to New Hampshire, and he looked at a street sign with three different routes on it," said his wife, Regina. "He said, 'Do you realize the first number is the perfect square root of this one?' When he looked at a number, he always had a story about it -- how it came about, how it's composed. He was always making math puzzles."

Mr. Cameron -- an award-winning mathematician who received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching -- died last Monday of a heart attack. He was 60.

Mr. Cameron didn't limit his mathematical passion to passing time during car rides. In the summer, when school was out for everyone else, Mr. Cameron was teaching his two daughters the Pythagorean theorem by the pool. When the family took a vacation to the Rhine River in Germany, he created algebra problems for them to solve.

Born in Middleborough in 1947, Mr. Cameron attended Memorial High School, from which he graduated in 1965. He received a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics from Kansas State University in 1969 and a master's degree in mathematics from the University of New Hampshire in 1980.

He met his wife of 36 years in 1966. "We were both working at a YMCA day camp, and he was working at the waterfront as a lifeguard and I was a camp counselor," his wife said.

Mr. Cameron started teaching in 1969 at Old Rochester Regional High School in Mattapoisett, and taught there until he retired in 2005. In addition to teaching, he coached the varsity golf team, the math team, and the chess team.

"He loved the creativeness, the intelligence, of his students," said his wife. "He loved it when they worked and finagled the math and approached it from a different angle."

After his retirement, Mr. Cameron continued teaching as an adjunct faculty member of mathematics at Massasoit Community College and Bridgewater State College.

"He always had to be doing something, and he enjoyed being in the classroom," Regina Cameron said.

In addition to being a presidential award winner, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Statistics at Princeton, an inductee to the Massachusetts Mathematics Teachers Hall of Fame, a Tandy Technology Scholar in Mathematics, a recipient of the Mary P. Dolciani scholarship, and a participant in a variety of National Science Foundation projects.

He spoke frequently at state, regional, national, and international mathematics conferences.

Mr. Cameron always wanted people to push themselves to do their best, according to his wife. "He'd say, 'I don't care if you're an A student, or the most intelligent person in the school. Are you doing your best to achieve the best of your ability?' "

When Mr. Cameron wasn't teaching, he loved traveling -- across the United States, as well as Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and New Zealand. "He loved the Bavarian Alps and the Black Forest," his wife said.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cameron is survived by a son, Erik; two daughters, Allison and Jessica; and a sister, Claudette.

A memorial service was to be held Friday at the Dahlborg-MacNevin Funeral Home in Lakeville.