Prof Neil Turok, Higgs chairman of theoretical physics at the university, told BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme what it was like to work with his late colleague.
“He was a very unusual person and is very warmly remembered in the physics department,” he said.
“He was a very shy and private man. A very unlikely figure to discover what is one of the most important foundations of our descriptions of the laws of nature.”
He said Prof Higgs made his discovery in a “very unexpected way” in 1964.
“He put various ideas together, which has been around, but he finally saw how the jigsaw puzzle worked,” he said.
“He wrote a very short paper, just one-and-a-half pages, many people thought it was ridiculous, and it took a long time for the idea to be accepted.”
The theory was proved 50 years later with the Large Hadron Collider.