Sir Nevill Mott (1905-1998) was a distinguished theoretical physicist who won a Nobel Prize for work done, after his retirement, on the electrical properties of non-crystalline materials. For many years he was Professor of Physics at Bristol University, and later became Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge.

He was notoriously absent-minded. The following story about him was told by M. Rodgers in Nature in 1996:

”Mott was travelling on the London to Bristol train when three thoughts occurred to him. First, he was no longer at the physics department in Bristol but Cavendish Professor at Cambridge; second, he had travelled to London earlier that day by car; and, third, he has been accompanied by his wife.”

He is also supposed to have been astonished when Francis Crick introduced him to James Watson a few years after their joint discovery of the DNA helix. Apparently Mott had always thought that Crick alone had been responsible, his full name being Watson-Crick!