Woflgang Ernst Pauli
Hannah Singletary
EDUCATION
He received his early education in Vienna before studying at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld. He obtained his doctor's degree in 1921 and spent a year at the University of Göttingen as assistant to Max Born and a further year with Neils Bohr at Copenhagen. The years 1923-1928 were spent as a lecturer at the University of Hamburg before his appointment as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. During 1935-1936, he was visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey and he had similar appointments at the University of Michigan (1931 and 1941) and Purdue University (1942). He was elected to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at Princeton in 1940 but he returned to Zurich at the end of World War II.
BACKGROUND
Wolfgang Pauli was born on 25th April 1900 in Vienna. His father Wolfgang Joseph, a well-known physician and professor of chemistry. His mother Bertha, née Schütz, was a freelance working for a Viennese newspaper. Pauli grew up in a highly stimulating intellectual atmosphere. His great gift for mathematics and the natural sciences became evident at an early age and was fostered by his father who engaged junior high school teacher and later university lecturer Hans Adolf Bauer to give his son extra tuition in mathematics. Bauer also introduced him to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.