Peter Higgs - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His father worked as a sound engineer for the BBC, and as a result of childhood asthma, together with the family moving around because of his father's job and later World War II, Higgs missed some early schooling and was taught at home. When his father relocated to Bedford, Higgs stayed behind with his mother in Bristol, and was largely raised there. He attended Cotham Grammar School, where he was inspired by the work of one of the school's alumni, Paul Dirac, a founder of the field of quantum mechanics.

At the age of 17 Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialized in mathematics, then to King's College London where he graduated with a first class honours in Physics, and later achieved a master's degree, and a Ph.D. He became a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, then held various posts at Imperial College London and University College London where he also became a temporary lecturer in Mathematics. He returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1960 to take up the post of Lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics, allowing him to settle in the city he had become taken with while hitchhiking to the Highlands as a student in 1949.

Higgs was promoted to a personal chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1983, was awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1984, and became a fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. In 2008 he received an Honorary Fellowship from Swansea University for his work in particle physics.