When was Peter Higgs born?

Peter Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne.

What positions has Peter Higgs held?

Positions held by Peter Higgs include: professor emeritus (1996–2024).

Where did Peter Higgs study?

Peter Higgs was educated at Cotham School, City of London School, King's College London, King's College London.

Bengt Nyman · CC BY 2.0

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Peter Higgs

पिटर हिग्स

British physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1929–2024)

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Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

Quick facts

Born: 29 May 1929 wd
Place of birth: Newcastle upon Tyne wd
Died: 8 April 2024 wd
Place of death: Edinburgh wd
Citizenship: United Kingdom wd
Occupation: theoretical physicist, particle physicist, physicist, university teacher wd
Education: Cotham School, City of London School, King's College London, King's College London, King's College London wd
Official website: ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs wd

Positions held wd

professor emeritus (1996–2024)

Awards wd

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1974)
Hughes Medal (1981)
Fellow of the Royal Society (1983)
Rutherford Medal and Prize (1984)
Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1991)
James Scott Prize Lectureship (1993)
High Energy and Particle Physics Prize (1997)
IOP Dirac Medal (1997)
honorary doctor of the University of Bristol (1997)
honorary doctor of the University of Edinburgh (1998)
Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1999)
honorary doctorate of the University of Glasgow (2002)
Wolf Prize in Physics (2004)
Oskar Klein Medal (2009)
Sakurai Prize (2010)

About

In 1964, Higgs was the single author of one of the three milestone papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that proposed that spontaneous symmetry breaking in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This Higgs mechanism predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics. In 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.

For this work, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with François Englert in 2013.

Questions

When was Peter Higgs born?: Peter Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne.
What positions has Peter Higgs held?: Positions held by Peter Higgs include: professor emeritus (1996–2024).
Where did Peter Higgs study?: Peter Higgs was educated at Cotham School, City of London School, King's College London, King's College London.

Sources

Last updated 1 November 2026 · facts checked 4 November 2026

Cite this page

"Peter Higgs". DigiNepal. Last updated 1 November 2026. https://diginpl.com/people/peter-higgs. Retrieved 4 November 2026.

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Text from the Wikipedia article Peter Higgs, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page's text is shared under the same licence. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Nobel Prize 24 2013 (cropped).jpg — Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0.

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