H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins

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

Longuet- Higgins was born the second of three children of a pastor, attended from 1932 with a grant from the Winchester College and from 1941 also with a scholarship gained the Balliol College, Oxford University. Both his talent noticed in mathematics and in music, and he sat down next to his study of chemistry also participate in the examinations in music and studied organ at Balliol College. Even as undergraduate student he made ​​a major breakthrough by clarifying the correct structure of diborane, and it differed from the explanatory model of the then leading theoretical chemist Linus Pauling After completing his doctorate at Charles Coulson in Oxford, he was a post-doc at the University of Chicago and the University of Manchester. In 1952 he became professor of theoretical physics at King's College in London, and in 1954 Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In the 1960s, he changed his field of work and devoted himself to the study of the brain, and perception processes and artificial intelligence, a field for which he coined in 1973 the term " cognitive science " ( Cognitive Science ). In 1967, he was with Donald Michie and Richard Gregory founder of the " Department for Machine Intelligence and Perception " at the University of Edinburgh. After arguments within the Institute on future research directions, at a time when the report from James Lighthill on research on artificial intelligence in the UK very unfavorable turned out, he went in 1974 to the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, where he most recently Professor Emeritus had.

In 1947 he developed the molecular orbital theory of conjugated ( and aromatic ) organic compounds. He also developed a thermodynamic theory of mixtures he extended polymer solutions. In the cognitive sciences, he and his students, among other algorithms for reconstructing three-dimensional visual perception of the two-dimensional projections (see epipolar geometry ), Mechanisms of language processing and the perception of music. Most recently he worked on the automatic generation of musical works from sounding 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 was five honorary doctorates (Bristol, Essex, York, Sussex ), Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Balliol College, Oxford and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1979 to 1984 he was a Governor of the BBC.

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

Writings

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