Pauli, Wolfgang 1900-58
Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Vienna, he studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich University, receiving his doctorate in 1921, then worked at G�ttingen University (1921-22) and with Niels Bohr at his institute in Copenhagen (1922-23) before becoming professor at Hamburg University (1923-28). In 1928 he moved to Zurich, became a Swiss citizen and was given a professorship at the Federal Institute of Technology. Pauli demonstrated that a fourth 'spin' quantum number was required to describe the state of an atomic electron, and went on to formulate the 'Pauli exclusion principle' (1924), which states that no two electrons in an atom can exist in exactly the same state, with the same quantum numbers. This gave a clear quantum description of electron distribution within different atomic energy states, and earned him the 1945 Nobel Prize for physics. He suggested the existence of a low-mass neutral particle (1931), later discovered as the neutrino, and his studies in the early 1950s of quantum interactions paved the way for Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang's discovery of parity non-conservation in 1956. He was visiting professor at Princeton University in 1935 and, at Albert Einstein's invitation, again from 1939 to 1946, the same year that he became a naturalized US citizen.