The Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900-1958) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the exclusion principle, known as the Pauli principle.

Wolfgang Pauli the son of Wolfgang Joseph Pauli, a professor in the University of Vienna, was born in that city on April 25, 1900. Brilliant at school, he studied theoretical physics in the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld (1918-1921) and graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy. Sommerfeld asked him to write the article on relativity for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences. The article, over 200 pages long, was published in 1921; it was translated into English and Italian in 1958 and is still definitive.

Pauli was an assistant to Max Born at Göttingen (1921-1922) and to Niels Bohr at Copenhagen (1922-1923). He then spent 5 years as a lecturer in the University of Hamburg, and in 1928 he became professor of physics in the Federal...