Nevill Mott describes his background in wave mechanics and who he learned from.

Weiner:

Well, we're starting off, I think the initial question on my long list was your own background in wave mechanics, where you learned it, and from whom.

Mott:

Yes. I’ll go back again by saying that both my father and my mother were research students in the Cavendish Laboratory under J. J. Thompson, and you will appreciate that I was brought up feeling that the Cavendish was the place to work in and that physics was an interesting subject. They were neither of them in physics after they married, or at least not for long, but this did make a difference. Well, I took mathematics at Cambridge and got a mathematical scholarship from my school, but I always thought that atomic physics was what I wanted to apply my mathematics to, and you will remember that in ‘26 and '27 it was a very exciting period. Schrodinger was writing his paper, and Heisenberg and Bohr. And I read these papers and had to learn German for the purpose. If you ask me why I did it, I mean, I had never thought of doing anything else. Since I can remember.

Then I was, as I said, in the mathematics faculty, but I used to come into the Cavendish, to hear lectures and hear people talk, and I suppose I learned quantum mechanics not from anyone, but from these papers. After all, my supervisor, when I was a research student, was R.H. Fowler, but I would say he was learning it at the same time. We could none of us really teach each other.