Wolf was born in 1935 in
Newark, New Jersey, and graduated from
Weequahic High School in 1952. He received his undergraduate degree from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and his Ph.D. from
Princeton University in 1960 for his thesis "On the Detection and Estimation Problem for Multiple Nonstationary Random Processes". He held faculty appointments at
New York University 1963–1965, the
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1965–1973 and the
University of Massachusetts Amherst 1973–1984, and worked at
RCA Laboratories and
Bell Laboratories. In 1984, he joined the
University of California, San Diego, where he applied communication and information theory to
magnetic storage. He also held a part-time appointment at
Qualcomm since its formation in 1985. He was president of the
IEEE Information Theory Society in 1974. He died on May 12, 2011. ==Awards and honors==