I am very happy to accept the translators' invitation to write a few
lines of introduction to this book. Of course, there is little need to
explain the author. Pauli's first famous work, his article on the theory
of relativity in the Encyc!opiidie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften was
written at the age of twenty. He afterwards took part in the development
of atomic physics from the still essentially classical picture of Bohr's
early work to the true quantum mechanics. Thereaftt'f, some of his work
concerned the treatment of problems in the framework of the new theory,
especially his paper on the hydrogen atom following the matrix method
without recourse to Schrodinger's analytic form of the theory. His
greatest achievement, the exclusion principle, generally known today
under his own name as the Pauli principle, that governs the quantum
theory of all problems including more than one electron, preceded the
basic work of Heisenberg and Schrodinger, and brought him the Nobel
prize. It includes the mathematical treatment of the spin by means of
the now so well- known Pauli matrices. In 1929, in a paper with
Heisenberg, he laid the foundation of quantum electrodynamics and, in
doing so, to the whole theory of quantized wave fields which was to
become the via regia of access to elementary particle physics, since
here for the first time processes of generation and annihilation of
particles could be described for the case of the photons.
