| AdminHistory | Michael Longuet-Higgins was born in Kent in 1925, the younger brother of Christopher Longuet-Higgins who was also elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Graduating from a mathematics degree at Cambridge University during the Second World War, Michael joined the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington, researching ocean waves. This would go on to be a key focus of his research for much of his career. Michael made notable contributions to oceanography, particularly through his study of surface and breaking waves, as well as ocean currents. He also used his mathematical expertise to study crystal growth and virus structures.
In 1954 he was recruited to the newly formed National Institute of Oceanography in Surrey, where he remained for over a decade. From 1967 to 1969 he helped establish the School of Oceanography at Oregon State University in Corvallis, befoe being appointed as a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge in 1969. During his time at Cambridge he also took a number of visiting professorship positions, particularly in the United States. Following his retirement from Cambridge in 1987 he returned to the US, first to La Jolla Institute from 1987 to 1988, then being appointed as a senior research scientist at the Institute of Nonlinear Sciences (INLS) at the Universtiy of California San Diego until retiring in 2001. |