2020-04-25 Sat

Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian-born physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in Vienna, Austria (then Austria-Hungary). He was raised as a Roman Catholic, although both his parents came from prominent Jewish families.

He was a recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which states that in an atom no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. Pauli made major contributions to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and solid-state physics, and he successfully hypothesized the existence of the neutrino. He also showed a precocious ability for physics getting his Ph.D. at age 21 even though he graduated high school at 18 (about the average age for graduation).

He seldom published papers, preferring lengthy correspondences with colleagues such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, with whom he had close friendships. Many of his ideas and results were never published and appeared only in his letters, which were often copied and circulated by their recipients.

Wolfgang Pauli appears on a 1983 Austrian stamp issued on the 25th anniversary of his death.

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