Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. He was born in Würzburg, Germany and died in Munich. Heisenberg was the head of the German nuclear energy project, though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated. He is most well-known for discovering one of the central principles of modern physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

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As a student, he met Niels Bohr in Göttingen in 1922. A fruitful and life long collaboration developed between the two.
He invented matrix mechanics, the first formalization of quantum mechanics in 1925, which he developed with the help of Max Born and Pascual Jordan. His uncertainty principle, developed in 1927, states that the simultaneous determination of two paired quantities, for example the position and momentum of a particle, has an unavoidable uncertainty. Together with Bohr, he formulated the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen" .
In the late 20s and early 30s, Heisenberg collaborated with Wolfgang Pauli, and along with Paul Dirac, developed an early version of quantum electrodynamics. However, at the time, nobody could get rid of the infinities plaguing the theory, and it was only after World War II that a technique called renormalization was invented to take care of the infinities.
After the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932, Heisenberg proposed the proton-neutron model of the atomic nucleus and used it to explain the nuclear spin of isotopes.
During the early days of the Nazi regime in Germany, Heisenberg was harassed as a "White Jew" for teaching theories that Albert Einstein, a prominent Jew, had conceived. Teaching these theories was in contradiction to the Nazi-sanctioned Deutsche Physik movement. After a character investigation that Heisenberg himself instigated and passed, SS chief Heinrich Himmler banned any further political attacks on the physicist.