Nuclear physicist
Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna, son of Wolfgang Josef Pauli, a renown professor of physics. He received his basic education in Vienna and continued his academic studies in Munich, where he was tutored by Arnold Sommerfeld. After receiving his doctor’s degree in 1921, Pauli spent a year at the University of Goettingen, Germany, and an other year with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. From 1923 to 1928 he was lecturer at the University of Hamburg, Germany. In 1928 he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was appointed as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Federal Institute of Technology.
In 1935-1936 Wolfgang Pauli was visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, where in 1940 he was elected to the chair of theoretical physics. He was visiting Professor also at the University of Michigan (1931 and 1941), and Purdue University (1942).
At the end of World War II (1945), Professor Pauli returned to Zurich. Pauli was the first to recognize the existence of the neutrino, an uncharged and massless particle, which carries off energy in radioactive B-disintegration. His exclusion principle crystallized the existing knowledge of atomic structure, which led to the recognition of the two-valued variable to characterize the state of an electron. Pauli helped to lay the foundations of the quantum theory of fields and consolidated field theory by giving proof of the relationship between spin and “statistics” of elementary particles.
Pauli has written many articles on problems of theoretical physics in scientific journals in various countries. His Theory of Relativity appeared in the Enzyklopaedie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, Vol. 5, Part 2 (1920), his Quantum Theory in Handbuch der Physik, Vol. 23 (1926), and his Principles of Wave Mechanics in Handbuch der Physik, Vol. 24 (1933). W. Pauli was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and a member of the Swiss Physical Society, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded the Lorenz Medal in 1930.
In 1945 Professor Wolfgang Pauli became a Nobel Prize Laureate of Physics. He died in Zurich in 1958.