Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE HonFInstP (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh,[8][9] and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.[10][11]

In the 1960s, Higgs proposed that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.[12][13] On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[14] 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.[15]

Higgs was honoured with a number of awards in recognition of his work, including the 1981 Hughes Medal from the Royal Society; the 1984 Rutherford Medal from the Institute of Physics; the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics from the Institute of Physics; the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society; the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics; the 2009 Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the 2010 American Physical Society J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics; and a unique Higgs Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012.[16] The discovery of the Higgs boson prompted fellow physicist Stephen Hawking to note that he thought that Higgs should receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work,[17][18] which he finally did, shared with François Englert in 2013.[19] Higgs was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2013 New Year Honours[20][21] and in 2015 the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal, the world's oldest scientific prize.[22]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs