Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian-born Swiss and American theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle." The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.