Wolfgang Pauli

His middle name came from his godfather, Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher.

In 1929, he married a Berlin dancer, Käthe Margarethe Deppner. But, the couple got divorced within a year in 1930. Shortly after the divorce from his first wife, he suffered a severe breakdown and was treated by the psychiatrist, Carl Jung.

Even though his treatment ended in 1934, he and Carl developed an extensive correspondence over the following years concerning physics and psychology.

He was born on April 25, 1900 in Vienna, Austria to Wolfgang Joseph Pauli, a chemist, and his wife, Berta Camilla Schütz. He had a sister, Hertha Ernestina Pauli, who became an actress.

His grandparents were from Prague; his great grandfather was Wolf Pascheles, a great Jewish publisher. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, although eventually he and his parents quit the Church.

He received his early education from the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna. He graduated with distinction from high school in 1918.

Later, he attended the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich where he received his PhD in theoretical physics in July 1921.

After obtaining his doctorate, he spent a year at the University of Göttingen as an assistant to Max Born. He also assisted Wilhelm Lenz at the University of Hamburg in 1922.

In 1922–23, he took a one-year leave to work at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen.

From 1923 to 1928, he served as a lecturer at the University of Hamburg. During this period, he was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of quantum mechanics.

In 1925, he formulated the exclusion principle, which stated that no two electrons could exist in the same quantum state.

During the 1920s Heisenberg published the matrix theory of modern quantum mechanics which Pauli used to derive the observed spectrum of the hydrogen atom, in 1926.

In 1925, he made his most famous discovery, the ‘Exclusion Principle’, addressing the anomalous Zeeman Effect by deducing that two electrons in an atom can never share the same quantum state or configuration at the same time.

In 1930, he conjectured the existence of neutral particles, which later came to be known as neutrinos, to preserve the conservation of energy in nuclear beta decay.

In 1940, he proved the spin-statistics theorem which states that particles with half-integer spin are fermions, while particles with integer spin are bosons.

In 1949, his research resulted in the Pauli-Villars regularization. This mathematical formula changes infinite values to finite numbers when used in calculations. This removed some infinite variables from the theories used in quantum physics theories.