Pauli, Wolfgang (vôlf`gäng pou`lē), 1900–1958, Austro-American physicist, b. Vienna. He studied first with A. Sommerfeld at Munich and then with Niels Bohr at Copenhagen. After lecturing (1923–28) at the Univ. of Hamburg, Pauli was appointed professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, which became famous under his direction. In the United States he was a member (1935–36, 1940–46) of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1946 he became a U.S. citizen. He divided his later years between Princeton and Zürich. He was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for his enunciation (1925) of the Pauli exclusion principle exclusion principle, physical principle enunciated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 stating that no two electrons in an atom can occupy the same energy state simultaneously.
..... Click the link for more information. , fundamental to quantum mechanics, according to which no two electrons in an atom may be in the same quantum state. It was later found that certain other particles also are governed by the principle. Among his many other achievements was the postulation of the existence of the neutrino neutrino (n

trē`nō) [Ital.
..... Click the link for more information. (1930), more than a quarter century before it was directly observed in 1956.

Pauli, Wolfgang

(born April 25, 1900, Vienna, Austria—died Dec. 15, 1958, Zürich, Switz.) Austrian-born U.S. physicist. At the age of 20, he wrote a 200-page encyclopaedia article on the theory of relativity. He taught physics in Zürich (1928–40) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In 1924 he proposed that a spin quantum number, +¹⁄₂ or −¹⁄₂, is necessary to specify electron energy states. In 1930 he proposed that the energy and momentum apparently lost when an electron is emitted from an atomic nucleus in beta decay is carried away by an almost massless, uncharged, and difficult-to-detect particle (the neutrino). He was awarded a 1945 Nobel Prize for his 1925 discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle.