Sir Nevill Mott | |
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Born | Nevill Francis Mott 30 September 1905 Leeds, England |
Died | 8 August 1996 Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England |
(aged 90)
Nationality | United Kingdom |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Doctoral advisor | R.H. Fowler |
Known for | |
Notable awards |
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Sir Nevill Francis Mott CH FRS (30 September 1905 – 8 August 1996) was an English 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. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can some times be metallic and some times insulating.
Mott was born in Leeds to Lilian Mary Reynolds and Charles Francis Mott and 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. At age ten, he began formal education at Clifton College in Bristol, then at St John's College, Cambridge, where he read the Mathematics Tripos.
Mott was appointed a Lecturer in the Physics Department at the University of Manchester in 1929. He returned to Cambridge in 1930 as a Fellow and lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, and in 1933 moved to the University of Bristol as Melville Wills Professor in Theoretical Physics.