Stephen Ray Wiggins (born 1959) is a Cherokee-American applied mathematics researcher and distinguished educator, also of British heritage, best known for his contributions in nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory and nonlinear phenomena. His wide contributions include Lagrangian aspects of fluid dynamics and reaction dynamics in theoretical chemistry.

Early life and education

Wiggins was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1959, and has two younger siblings. He is enrolled as a member of the Cherokee Nation. He received a BSc in physics and mathematics from Pittsburg State University in 1980, an MA in mathematics and an MSc in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983, and a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University in 1985. He also attended the Open University in Great Britain, where he earned a Bachelor of Laws, with honors, in 2005.

Academic career and field of study

Wiggins was influenced heavily by his PhD advisor Philip Holmes. His dissertation was on "Slowly Varying Oscillators." From 1987 to 2001, he was a professor at Caltech. He is actively working on the advancement of computational applied mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he was the head of the mathematics department from 2004 until 2008, and was the school research director. As of August 2020 Wiggins had 12 PhD students and 60 academic descendants. Wiggins has contributed in many different areas of applied mathematics, science, and engineering using applied and computational dynamics as the framework for his approach and analysis. His current focus is on developing the phase space approach to chemical reaction dynamics in the setting of the CHAMPS (Chemistry and Mathematics in Phase Space) project. Previously he has established quite successful US-UK-Spain research network in building novel foundational connection between applied mathematics and theoretical chemistry.

Honors

Wiggins received the Presidential Young Investigators Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in August 1989. He was a Stanislaw M. Ulam Visiting Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, from 1989 to 1990. He received the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in Applied Analysis in 1989.

Selected publications

Books

Open books