Nevill Francis Mott was born in 1905, in Leeds, England, the first of two children of Charles Francis and Lilian Mary (Reynolds) Mott, both of whom worked for the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University under J. J. Thomson, who had just discovered the electron. In 1927, he received a baccalaureate degree in mathematics from Cambridge, where he did his first work in theoretical physics, studying the scattering of electrons by nuclei. He continued those studies during a 1928 term in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, who in 1913 had put forth the theoretical model of the atom. Mott went on to teach at Manchester University during the 1929-1930 school year and received an introduction to solid state physics from William Lawrence Bragg, who with his father, William Henry Bragg, won a Nobel Prize for his work in X-ray crystallography. In 1930, Mott returned to Cambridge, received a master's degree, became a lecturer at Cambridge's...