Hitchin attended Ecclesbourne School, Duffield, and earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1968.

In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford, a position he held until his retirement in 2016.

Higgs bundles, which are also developed in the work of Carlos Simpson, are closely related to the Hitchin system, which has an interpretation as a moduli space of semistable Higgs bundles over a compact Riemann surface or algebraic curve.

In the span of his career, Hitchin has supervised 37 research students, including Simon Donaldson (part-supervised with Atiyah).

A conference was held in honour of his 60th birthday, in conjunction with the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Spain.