H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins

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Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins was both a theoretical chemist and a cognitive scientist. He was born on April 11, 1923 in Kent, England and died on March 27, 2004.

He was educated at the The Pilgrim's School, Winchester, and Winchester College. In 1941, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He read chemistry, but also took Part I of the Music Tripos. He was a Balliol organ scholar.

As an undergraduate he proposed the correct structure of the chemical compound diborane (B2H6), which was then unknown because it turned out to be different from structures in contemporary chemical valence theory. This was published with his tutor, R. P. Bell,^[1].

He completed a DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Charles Coulson. This was followed by post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago and the University of Manchester.

In 1952, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College, London, and in 1954 became Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

He became interested in the brain and the new field of artificial intelligence. As a consequence, in 1967, he made a major change in his career by moving to the University of Edinburgh to co-found the Department of Machine intelligence and perception, with Richard Gregory and Donald Michie.

He later moved to the experimental psychology department at Sussex University, Brighton, United Kingdom. He retired in 1988. At the time of his death he was Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.