Nevill Francis Mott

Nevill Francis Mott was born 30 September 1905 in Britain and spent his career in theoretical physics, drawn to questions other physicists found messy: the electronic behavior of materials that refused clean categories. He focused on magnetic and disordered systems, particularly amorphous semiconductors — substances without the tidy crystal structure that most theories assumed. Working in parallel with Philip W. Anderson and John Van Vleck, Mott clarified why certain magnetic or amorphous materials could be metallic under one set of conditions and insulating under another, a puzzle that had fr…