Theoretical physicist, born in Würzburg, Germany. He studied at Munich and Göttingen. After a brief period working with Max Born (1923) and Niels Bohr (1924-7), he became professor of physics at Leipzig (1927-41), director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (1941-5), and director of the Max Planck Institute at Göttingen (and from 1958 at Munich). He developed a method of expressing quantum mechanics in matrices (1925), and formulated his revolutionary principle of indeterminacy (the uncertainty principle) in 1927. He was awarded the 1932 Novel Prize for Physics.