Born in Australia and having worked both there and in California, Peter Higgins moved with his wife and four children to Essex University in Colchester in 1990 where he has worked ever since. He is a research algebraist, a writer of popular mathematics books, and inventor of the puzzle type Circular Sudoku. In 2013 he was made a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and won the Premio Peano prize for the best book about mathematics published in Italy in 2012.