Stephen John Bigelow is an Australian mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1] He is known for his proof that braid groups are linear, concurrently with and independently of another proof by Daan Krammer.[2]
Bigelow earned bachelor's and master's degrees in 1992 and 1994 from the University of Melbourne.[1] He completed his PhD in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley under the joint supervision of Robion Kirby and Andrew Casson.[3] He returned to Melbourne for two years as a research fellow before joining the UCSB faculty in 2002.[1]
Bigelow was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002, speaking on representations of braid groups.[4] He was a Sloan Research Fellow for 2002–2006.[1] In 2012 he was designated as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[5]