Denis Higgs

Denis A. Higgs ( – ) was a British mathematician, Doctor of Mathematics, and professor of mathematics who specialised in combinatorics, universal algebra, and category theory. He wrote one of the most influential papers in category theory entitled A category approach to boolean valued set theory, which introduced many students to topos theory. He was a member of the National Committee of Liberation and was an outspoken critic against the apartheid in South Africa.

Life

He earned degrees from Cambridge University, St John's College, in England, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and McMaster University in Canada.

On 28 August 1964, he was kidnapped from his home in Lusaka, Zambia. Then South Africa's Justice Minister John Vorster, who later became Prime Minister, denied any involvement by either the South African government or the police, but accused Higgs of being an accessory to the bombing that killed Ethel Rhys and wounded many others.

On 1 September, an unidentified man who claimed to be part of British Protectorates called the Rand Daily Mail newspaper and gave specific details of Denis Higgs's whereabouts. On 2 September, police authorities found him. He was blindfolded and bound in a van over by the Zoo Park area. Although Higgs was wanted for the Johannesburg railway bombing that killed Rhys, authorities declined to prosecute since Higgs had been returned to South Africa via an extrajudicial kidnapping rather than proper extradition channels.

His academic papers were published in Algebra Universalis, the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society, the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, and Mathematics of Computation, among other journals.

He died on 25 February 2011.

Academic publications