Christopher Longuet-Higgins

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Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins (born April 11, 1923 in the parish of Lenham in Kent , † March 27, 2004 ) was a British theoretical chemist and physicist . He made important contributions to quantum chemistry and later dealt with cognitive science .

Longuet-Higgins was born as the second of three children of a pastor, attended Winchester College from 1932 on a scholarship and from 1941 onwards to Balliol College at Oxford University with a scholarship won . His talent in both mathematics and music was noticeable, and in addition to studying chemistry, he also took music exams and studied the organ at Balliol College. As a pre-graduate student, he achieved a great success by clarifying the correct structure of diborane and deviating from the explanatory model of the then leading theoretical chemist Linus Pauling . After completing his doctorate with Charles Coulson in Oxford in 1948, he was a post-doc with Robert Mulliken at the University of Chicago and the University of Manchester from 1948–49 . In 1952 he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Kings College in London and in 1954 Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge . In the 1960s, he changed his field of work and devoted himself to the study of the brain, perceptual processes and artificial intelligence, a field for which he 1973 the term "cognitive science" ( cognitive science ) coined. In 1967 he founded the Department for Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh with Donald Michie and Richard Gregory . After disputes within the institute about future research directions, at a time when Michael James Lighthill's report on research on artificial intelligence in Great Britain was very unfavorable, he went to the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex in 1974 , where he was most recently Professor Emeritus was.

In 1947 he developed the molecular orbital theory of conjugated (and aromatic ) organic compounds. He also developed a thermodynamic theory of mixtures, which he then extended to polymer solutions. In the cognitive sciences he and his students examined, among other things, algorithms for the reconstruction of three-dimensional visual perception from the two-dimensional projections (see epipolar geometry ), mechanisms of language processing and music perception. Most recently, he worked on the automatic generation of musical-sounding works from scores.

Longuet-Higgins was a Fellow of the Royal Society , the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He has five honorary doctorates (Bristol, Essex, York, Sussex), an honorary fellow of Wolfson College in Cambridge and Balliol College in Oxford and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961). From 1979 to 1984 he was a governor of the BBC .

His younger brother Michael Longuet-Higgins (1925-2016) was a mathematician, oceanographer and geophysicist and professor of hydrodynamics at the University of California, San Diego .

Fonts

  • The Nature of Mind, The Development of Mind, Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh 1972/3
  • Mental Processes: Studies in Cognitive Science, MIT Press 1987.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ published with his tutor RP Bell: The structure of the boron hydrides ", Journal of the Chemical Society, 1943, pp. 250-255.
  2. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins at academictree.org, accessed on January 1, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Longuet-Higgins, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Longuet-Higgins, Hugh Christopher (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British theoretical chemist and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Lenham Parish, Kent
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 2004