Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors.
Background
Nevill Francis Mott was born on September 30, 1905 in Leeds, England, in the family of C.F. and Lilian Mary (Reynolds) Mott. He grew up first in the village of Giggleswick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where his father was Senior Science Master at Giggleswick School. His mother also taught Maths at the School. The family moved (due to his father's jobs) first to Staffordshire, then to Chester and finally Liverpool, where his father had been appointed Director of Education. Mott was at first educated at home by his mother, who was a Cambridge Mathematics Tripos graduate. His parents had met in the Cavendish Laboratory, when both were engaged in physics research.
Education
At age ten, Nevill began formal education at Clifton College in Bristol, then at St John's College, Cambridge, where he read the Mathematics Tripos.
Career
Mott began more than forty years as an educator at Cambridge University’s Gonville and Caius College in 1930. In 1933 he became a physics professor at the University of Bristol, taking on the directorship of the school’s Henry Herbert Wills Physical Laboratories in 1948. During World War II, he served as a scientific adviser to the Anti-Aircraft Command in England. He conducted influential work with radio waves and explosives. He returned to Cambridge in 1954 as the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory; earlier he had studied under Lord Rutherford, who headed Cavendish at that time. In 1959 he became master of Gonville and Caius College. He became professor emeritus in 1971 and began working on his research pursuits with renewed enthusiasm. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 and was named Chevalier of the French National Order of Merit the same year. During his career, he also was chairperson and later president of Taylor and Francis publishers, chaired the education committee for the Royal Society, was president of the International Union of Physics, and was an educational adviser to Israel, Greece, and several African countries. In 1995 he was appointed to Companion of Honour.
Achievements
Mott was knighted for his contributions to the field of physics, which led to significant developments with computer memory, and such work also earned him the Nobel Prize at the age of seventy-two. The term Mott insulator is named for him, as well as the Mott polynomials, which he introduced.
