The university, where Higgs was emeritus professor, said he died Monday "peacefully at home following a short illness."
Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle — the so-called Higgs boson — in 1964. But it would be almost 50 years before the particle's existence could be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider.
Higgs' theory related to how subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.