Professor Wolfgang Pauli, c mid-20th century

Wolfgang Ernest Pauli, born 25 April 1900, died 15 December 1958. Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist. Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945, for his discovery of the Pauli principle, after being nominated by Albert Einstein. Pauli was also a pioneer of quantum mechanics. Pauli was born to a historically Jewish family in Vienna, but raised Roman Catholic. He attended the University of Munich and received his PhD in 1921. Pauli reviewed Einstein's theory of relativity in 1921, which was published as a monograph and remains the reference for it. It was widely praised, including by Einstein himself. Pauli worked for a year at the University of Göttingen as an assistant to Max Born, and then at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. He also held visiting professorships at Michigan and Princeton. In 1929, Pauli married Käthe Margarethe Deppner, a cabaret dancer. They divorced a year later. In 1930, Pauli had a personal crisis and in 1932, sought the help of psychotherapist Carl Jung who began work on interpreting Pauli's dreams. Pauli and Jung then began collaborative work on epistemology. Pauli also features as a basis of Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, published in 1968. Pauli published a book on physics, in 1933, considered by Oppenheimer to be the quintessential introduction to quantum mechanics. Pauli remarried in 1934 to Franziska Bertram, they had no children. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Pauli became a German citizen, and he tried, unsuccessfully, to become a Swiss citizen. In 1940, Pauli moved to the US and worked for Princeton, and in 1946, became a naturalised US citizen. He also returned to Switzerland in 1946, and in 1949, became a Swiss citizen. In 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max Planck medal. Pauli was dragonised with pancreatic cancer in 1958, and died the same year, aged 58.