Emil Wolf (1922–2018)

Emil Wolf was born to a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Pavla and Josef Wolf and he had a brother, Karel. He was forced to flee his native country at age 17 in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded on the eve of World War II. After brief periods in Italy and France, where he worked for the Czech government in exile, he moved to the UK in 1940. There he enrolled at Bristol University, and earned his BSc degree in mathematics and physics in 1945, and his PhD in mathematics in 1948. From 1951 to 1954, he worked at the University of Edinburgh with quantum physicist Max Born, writing the now-classic textbook Principles of Optics (1958) -- usually known simply as Born and Wolf. After a period at the University of Manchester, Prof. Wolf moved to the USA in 1959 to take a position in the Department of Physics at the University of Rochester. He remained there for more than 50 years and became the Wilson Professor of Optical Physics. He was a pioneer in optical coherence theory, the merging of optics and statistics. He published more than 400 papers in physics journals and was the co-author with his colleague Leonard Mandel of Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics (1995), also a classic work. He edited the Progress in Optics series of books from its inception in 1962. He served as president of the Optical Society of America (OSA) in 1978. Prof. Wolf remained an active teacher, researcher, and author well into his 80s. Among his numerous honors, he was the recipient of the Max Born Award of the OSA (1987), the Marconi Medal of the Italian National Research Council (1987), the Gold Medal of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science (1991), and the 2009 Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award at the University of Rochester.