Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins (11 April 1923 – 27 March 2004) was a British theoretical chemist and cognitive scientist.
He was also a gifted amateur musician, both as performer and composer, and was keen to advance the scientific understanding of this art.
At Winchester College he was one of the "gang of four" consisting of himself, his brother Michael, Freeman Dyson and James Lighthill.
While at Cambridge he made many original contributions in the field of theoretical chemistry, and he was perhaps unfortunate not to receive the Nobel prize for his work.
[7] Among the most important were his discovery[14] of Geometric phase at the conical intersection of potential energy surfaces, his introduction of the correlation diagram approach[15] to the study of Woodward-Hoffmann rules, and his introduction of nuclear permutation-inversion symmetry groups[16] for the study of molecular symmetry.
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.
In 1974 he moved to the Centre for Research on Perception and Cognition (in the Department of Experimental Psychology) at Sussex University, Brighton, England.
In 2005 the Longuet-Higgins Prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that Have Withstood the Test of Time" was created in his honor.