H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins

H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins
Born (1923-04-11)11 April 1923
Lenham, Kent, England
Died 27 March 2004(2004-03-27) (aged 80)
Institutions King's College London
University of Chicago
University of Manchester
University of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
University of Sussex
Alma mater University of Oxford
Thesis Some problems in theoretical chemistry by the method of molecular orbitals (1947)
Doctoral advisor Charles Coulson
Doctoral students Peter Higgs[1]
Geoffrey Hinton
Mark Steedman
Mark Child
Anthony Stone
David Willshaw, Mark Agnostini, David Hinton, John Murrell, Lionel Salem,[2] Graeme Ritchie,[3] Philip Bunker[4]
Notable awards Fellow of the Royal Society
Naylor Prize and Lectureship (1981)

Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins FRS[5] (April 11, 1923 – March 27, 2004) was both a theoretical chemist and a cognitive scientist. He was the older brother of Michael S. Longuet-Higgins.

Biography

Longuet-Higgins was born on 11 April 1923 in Lenham, Kent, England.

He was educated at The Pilgrims' School, Winchester, and Winchester College. In 1941, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He read chemistry, but also took Part I of a degree in Music. 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.[6] He completed a DPhil at the University of 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 John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge,[7] 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, England. In 1981 he introduced the essential matrix to the computer vision community in a paper which also included the eight-point algorithm for the estimation of this matrix. He retired in 1988. At the time of his death, in 2004, he was Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex.

Longuet-Higgins died on 27 March 2004, aged 80. He was an atheist.[8]

Academic works

His work on developing computational models of music understanding was recognized in the nineties by the award of an Honorary Doctorate of Music by Sheffield University.

An example of Longuet-Higgins's writings, introducing the field of music cognition:[9]

Longuet-Higgins et al (1994):[10] —
You're browsing, let us imagine, in a music shop, and come across a box of faded pianola rolls. One of them bears an illegible title, and you unroll the first foot or two, to see if you can recognize the work from the pattern of holes in the paper. Are there four beats in the bar, or only three? Does the piece begin on the tonic, or some other note? Eventually you decide that the only way of finding out is to buy the roll, take it home, and play it on the pianola. Within seconds your ears have told you what your eyes were quite unable to make out—that you are now the proud possessor of a piano arrangement of "Colonel Bogey".

Selected works

Honors and awards

Christopher Longuet-Higgins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958, a Foreign Associate of the US Academy of Sciences in 1968, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1969, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1970. He was a Fellow of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He had honorary doctorates from the universities of Bristol, Essex, Sheffield, Sussex and York. Among his notable prizes were the Jasper Ridley prize in music from Balliol College, the Harrison memorial prize from the Chemical Society, and the Naylor prize from the London Mathematical Society. He was a governor of the BBC from 1979 to 1984.

In 2005 the Longuet-Higgins Prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that Have Withstood the Test of Time" was created in his honor. The prize is awarded every year at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference for up to two distinguished papers published at that same conference ten years earlier.

Family

His younger brother is Michael S. Longuet-Higgins.

References

  1. ↑ Peter Higgs Website webpage at University of Edinburgh
  2. ↑ "Chemistry Tree - Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins Details".
  3. ↑ "The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins".
  4. ↑ "(Hugh) Christopher Longuet-Higgins - Genealogy". Theoretical Chemistry Genealogy Project.
  5. ↑ Gregory, R. L.; Murrell, J. N. (2006). "Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins. 11 April 1923 -- 27 March 2004: Elected FRS 1958". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 52: 149. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2006.0012.
  6. ↑ Longuet-Higgins, H. C.; Bell, R. P. (1943). "64. The Structure of the Boron Hydrides". Journal of the Chemical Society (Resumed). 1943: 250–255. doi:10.1039/JR9430000250.
  7. ↑ Venn Cambridge University database Archived 14 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ↑ "By that time Longuet-Higgins had become a convinced atheist, although he still respected many of the features of the Church of England." John Murrell, 'Higgins, (Hugh) Christopher Longuet- (1923–2004)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, January 2008 (accessed May 1, 2008).
  9. ↑ Longuet-Higgins, H. C.; Webber, B.; Cameron, W.; Bundy, A.; Hudson, R.; Hudson, L.; Ziman, J.; Sloman, A.; Sharples, M.; Dennett, D. (1994). "Artificial Intelligence and Musical Cognition [and Discussion]". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 349 (1689): 103. Bibcode:1994RSPTA.349..103L. doi:10.1098/rsta.1994.0116.
  10. ↑ Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1979). "Review Lecture: The Perception of Music". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 205 (1160): 307. doi:10.1098/rspb.1979.0067.
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